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To his credit, Sam doesn’t say ‘I told you so’.
What he does say, however, is “You should probably go and check on her,” which as far as Debbie is concerned is about a thousand times worse.
She’s quite proud of the glare she levels at him for that. It’s her best take-no-shit glare, the one that says ‘don’t push your fucking luck’ with just a hint of starlet sparkle. It’s the one she used to throw at Mark all the time to make him shut his mouth when he started trying to talk about his feelings or their relationship or what they should have for dinner or whatever other fragile male bullshit he’d got into his stupid head on any given day. It’s one of her very favourite glares, and definitely her most practised, and it comes in especially handy when dealing with self-important men who think they know everything.
She doesn’t often get to use it in a professional setting, though, so she’ll throw a couple of points to Sam for that. He might be an arrogant dickhead, just like every other man in the industry, but at least he wasn’t just talking out of his ass when he said, in his maddeningly effective pitch to get her on board with his wrestling show, that he actually wanted to see her real, honest anger.
He doesn’t like it — which is good, it means it’s working; he’s not supposed to fucking like it — but he’s willing to take it, and he only really complains about it when he’s having a shitty day himself.
Debbie may not respect the guy, but that attitude is one she can work with.
What she can’t work with, what she won’t work with, what she absolutely refuses to work with, is—
“Someone should go check on her,” Justine chimes in helpfully. “She’s wasted.”
‘She’, of course, being the bane of Debbie’s existence these past few weeks, Ruth fucking Wilder.
‘She’, of course, being the only person in the world stupid and self-destructive enough to get totally fucking shitfaced and then try to wrestle her former best friend in the ring, just to prove she could do it. ‘She’ being the biggest human disaster on the fucking planet, and honestly, even if Debbie hadn’t been an active participant in the whole drunken-wrestling debacle, even if she hadn’t been the one to drag the little bitch into the ring in the first place, she’s pretty sure she’d still know exactly who the fuck she was.
No-one pulls stupid, dangerous, self-destructive shit like Ruth, and no-one knows that better than Debbie.
Which, she supposes, is precisely why Sam, Justine, and everybody else in the gym is staring right at at her.
“You go check on her,” she growls at Sam. “She’s your fucking protégé.”
“She’s your fucking heel,” Sam shoots back, effortless asshole that he is.
Debbie crosses her arms, amps up her glare. “I still haven’t agreed to—”
“Yeah, you did.”
Debbie really, really wants to argue against that point, but they both know she can’t. It’s the one downside of working with a director, arrogant dickhead or otherwise, who actually takes the time to hear her out when she has something to say: it makes her want to be straight with him, makes her want to be worthy of the effort he puts into setting aside his ego to make room for hers.
It’s a stupid thing to do, showing that kind of weakness; she knows that, just like she knows it will absolutely, definitely come back later to bite her in the ass, but what can she say? She’s a paragon of virtue, just like her all-American character.
The fact is, whether Debbie wants to admit it or not, Sam is right.
The second she put on that stupid Southern accent and goaded Ruth’s hopelessly drunk ass into the ring, she knew what she was saying. “Let’s go, you dirty Russian,” she drawled as Liberty Belle, all peaches and cream and apple pie, and she didn’t just mean now, she meant for real, and she meant for good.
She hates herself for it, she really does. But yeah, Sam is right about her, and he was right about Ruth too. Even shitfaced, even wrecked and wasted and fucked up beyond all repair, even when given less than thirty seconds to prove herself, that overachieving little homewrecker still gave her the best damn match she’d had all day.
And it wasn’t even close.
Fuck Ruth Wilder, Debbie thinks. Fuck her talent, fuck her determination, fuck her commitment, fuck her dedication. Fuck her stupid hopelessly drunk ass, and fuck Sam Sylvia too. That asshole couldn’t pay Debbie enough to give a shit.
“If she couldn’t handle her fucking liquor,” Debbie says, to him and everyone else in the room, “she shouldn’t have gotten in the ring in the first place. I don’t care if she’s choking to death on her own vomit, she’s— it’s not my problem.”
“She could be,” Arthie volunteers. “Not, uh... not the ‘your problem’ part, the other part. It’s a very real possibility.”
“I seriously doubt it,” Debbie sighs, massaging her suddenly throbbing temples. “I could never get that fucking lucky.”
Arthie blanches at that, squeamish now in a way she never gets when dealing with concussions and rolled ankles and genuine bodily unpleasantness. She shudders, ducking her head with a blend of shyness and discomfort, and one or two of the other girls turn their faces away too, like it offends their delicate sensibilities to look directly at a woman with thoughts as dark as Debbie’s.
Maybe it’s the all-American thing, the Liberty Belle persona she’s been trained to wear for as long as she’s been serious about acting. Her whole damn life, Debbie has been shoved into the neatest, cleanest, most inoffensive-looking box that other people can find, and all because of the way she looks; why should this be any different?
Women aren’t allowed to harbour dark thoughts, even towards the people who deserve the very worst, and women like her, the bombshell blondes, aren’t often allowed to harbour any kind of thoughts at all. Men can have all the twisted, violent fantasies they want, revenge or otherwise, but the moment a woman dares to imagine something less than perfectly kind and sweet and loving, the moment she dares to feel something real, all of a sudden she’s some kind of monster.
Never mind that Ruth deserves it. Never mind that she’s the one who actually did the shitty things Debbie only fantasised about.
Girls like Arthie, like Rhonda, like who-the-fuck-ever else, they don’t understand what it’s like to feel that strongly, that deeply.
Not like Debbie does. Not like someone who has watched her whole fucking life burn down all around her, then stepped back to shield her eyes from the blaze only to find that the person she trusted the most in the whole fucking world was the one who lit the match.
She doesn’t flatter herself she’s the only one in here who feels like that. They’re working on a wrestling show, after all, and Sam’s been pretty clear about wanting the unpolished edges of female fury. She knows there are others, in the gym and outside of it too, who know what it is to feel the kind of things that aren’t made for cable television, who have those depths of ugliness boiling hot in their veins. She knows that, she does.
But she also knows, looking around at the handful of faces staring back at her, that it’s not nearly as many as she’d like.
Reggie, for sure. She’s got that athlete’s hunger, the kind of raw, unfiltered wildness that gets off on drawing real blood. Debbie’s shoulder is still sore from their earlier tussle — she won’t deign to call it a match — and after shoving a small human out of her vagina she’s not generally the kind to quibble about minor discomforts.
Sheila too, maybe. She’s harder to read, harder to make sense of, but she is what she is, feral and wolf-wild and completely fucking crazy, howling at the moon or whatever other bullshit she does. She might not know rage, might not know hatred or hurt or that soul-deep betrayal, but she sure as hell knows something about the shitty nature of humanity.
And then, of course, there’s Melrose.
The team’s resident loose canon, the self-proclaimed ‘party girl’, like she really thinks that moniker is fooling anyone. She plays it up well enough, all booze and bravado, swaggering around both in and out of the ring, acting like she doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone or anything, making everyone else’s life hell just because she can. She’s a real pro in that particular role, a real fucking method actress, going so hard and so deep she probably doesn’t even realise she’s doing it.
She thinks she knows what she’s about, Melrose, but Debbie has worked with girls and women like her before, and she knows that the so-called ‘party girl’ feels a whole lot more, and a whole lot darker, than she’ll ever admit out loud, even to herself.
Like right now, for example.
It’s all too easy to forget about a nobody like Melrose in a moment like this, when all the action and the drama and the spotlights are shining on the real stars for once. It’s easy to dismiss her irritability as harmless, pointless, a child’s tantrum because god forbid all eyes not be on her for five fucking seconds. A cry for attention, Cherry would call it, if she hadn’t stormed out three hours ago, and then make a point of not giving her any. Like she really believes ignoring a woman who refuses to be ignored will somehow find and patch up the base root of the problem, like it’s not just a band-aid for a totally different wound.
Cherry thinks she has Melrose’s number. Debbie knows she’s been dialling it wrong for weeks.
Debbie’s had an eye on Melrose for the last fifteen minutes at least. The eye that isn’t glaring at Sam, the eye that isn’t rolling itself almost out of her head at Arthie’s gentle concern, at Justine’s teenage amusement. The eye that no-one else ever notices, the eye that notices everyone and everything, the eye that’s always casting around, seeking out safe and dangerous spaces to hide in or hide from, weak spots or bright lights in every room, every corner, every person.
She’s been watching Melrose from the moment Ruth staggered into the gym, the moment she started going full-tilt with her stupid “forget the Russians, it’s all about the Jews now” bullshit. Drunken insensitivity is one thing, and Debbie knows better than most the shameful depths that Ruth is capable of plumbing when she’s shitfaced, but the look on Melrose’s face then was murderous.
It’s murderous now, too, as she pushes off from the edge of the ring, steps away from Arthie and the rest of the girls, and muscles her way into Debbie’s personal space. She’s all strut and saunter, just like she always is, like even now she can’t quite bring herself to switch it off, to let go of the safety blanket of arrogance and attitude. She’s all show, all performance, but her eyes are on Debbie’s and they are dark.
Debbie respects that a lot.
“I’m going to make this easy for you, Goldilocks,” Melrose purrs, and because she’s not posturing, because the words are real even if the pose isn’t, Debbie allows her to keep talking unchecked. “Either you go and check on her or I will. And if I do it, I’m going to beat her skinny little antisemitic ass so fucking hard she’ll wish she’d choked to death on her own vomit.”
She’s showing her teeth, not like a smile but like a threat, seething wrath and gnawing hunger, a predator marking its territory, making sure every smaller creature in a hundred-mile radius knows what will happen if it dares to get too close. A bit like Reggie when she reminds them all that Debbie stole her character, a bit like Sheila when she falls too deep into her she-wolf persona and terrifies the shit out of everybody.
A bit like Debbie too, on the days she fantasises about doing worse things to Ruth than beating her ass.
“You know what?” she retorts, too casual, too careless. “Go right ahead. I’d pay good money to see that.”
Melrose doesn’t smile. “I’m serious.”
So am I, Debbie thinks, but they both know she isn’t, not really.
“Come on,” she says instead, hating how quickly she deflates, hating the way her heart instinctively jumps to defend the same bitch she’d give her right arm to see beaten that badly. “She’s not... it wasn’t like that.”
“Easy for you to say,” Melrose throws back, expression suddenly hard. “You deal with a lot of prejudice, Liberty Belle?”
Arthie winces, flinches just hard enough that Debbie notices. “Hey, take it easy. Let’s not...”
She stops, shrinking down, like she knows she won’t be able to stop this. Like she knows—
Which, yeah, she probably does.
She’s even paler now than she was a moment ago. It’s a different kind of pale, though, not the kind that comes from discomfort at seeing an angry woman in her natural environment. It’s not the sheltered, seeing-the-world-for-the-first time kind of pale, the kind that makes Debbie vividly and painfully aware of how young some of these girls actually are, but a harsher, rougher kind, a pallour that comes from a more personal place, a more painful place.
Prejudice, Melrose said, spitting the word out like it was poison, and yeah, Debbie might only have personal experience with that through the lens of the brutally feminine, the smoking hot blonde with the big tits, the bombshell who exists solely for the pleasure of men and to hell with her own autonomy; she may be as lucky as a woman can get in this day and age, but she’s not an idiot; she knows what that word means to people like Arthie, people like Cherry or Tammé, Carmen or Jenny or—
Or, yeah, Melanie Danielle Rosen.
There are a lot of reasons why a woman looking to break into Hollywood might choose to change her name. Debbie knows that, just like she knows that not all of those reasons carry weight or trauma or whatever the fuck else. But she can hazard a pretty solid guess as to why Melrose did it, and why a stupid, insensitive, drunken stunt from a stupid, insensitive, drunken idiot like Ruth might turn a don’t-give-a-shit party girl into a force of vengeful fury.
Debbie closes her eyes. Counts very slowly to ten. Opens them.
“I’ll go and check on her,” she says at last, feeling the words settle like lead behind her suddenly heavy eyes. “And I’ll talk to her about being less...” She sighs. “...herself.”
Melrose’s expression doesn’t change, but Debbie thinks her eyes lose a touch of their darkness.
“Tell her about the ass-beating,” she says, with none of her usual performance, none of that stupid showy sarcasm. “Make that part crystal fucking clear.”
Debbie pinches the bridge of her nose. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She finds Ruth in the locker room, lying flat on her back on the floor of one of the toilet cubicles and giggling up at the ceiling like some kind of deranged, drunken madwoman.
It’s more or less exactly what she expected, to be honest.
What she doesn’t expect, what she couldn’t possibly have expected and certainly didn’t want, is the way it pulls in her chest. It’s not really pain, the tug of discomfort behind her ribs, but it’s powerful all the same, a blast of nostalgia so profound it sucks all the air out of her lungs and out of the room, leaves her dazed and dizzy, staring down at the woman who destroyed her life, the woman she’s seen in this position more times than she can count, and suddenly, inexplicably, unable to draw a full breath.
“Fuck,” she hears herself croak, and Ruth’s head jerks up like it’s attached to Debbie’s voice by a string.
“Debbie?” Her voice is hoarse, and she’s squinting up at Debbie like her face is a damn spotlight. “Deb?”
The lone syllable cuts, short and sharp, like a shot of cheap vodka or whatever other method-actress Russian bullshit Ruth’s been soaking in for the last six hours. It’s the tiniest fucking thing, a nickname of a nickname, a whistle of a breath that reeks of liquor and vomit, but it throws Debbie back to a decade’s worth of moments like this, a decade of peeling Ruth up off the floor of some shitty bathroom or another, of being peeled up herself two or three nights later from a different floor in a different part of town, of freedom and friendship and oh, fuck, she was wrong, that awful tugging feeling in her chest is pain, it really, definitely is.
“Don’t,” she grits out, sounding just as hoarse as Ruth, and just as fucked up. “Don’t you dare call me that, you bitch.”
Ruth giggles again, free and unfettered and completely fucking wasted. “Oh, but we were so great, weren’t we? You and me and the... and... and, just, everything. We were so fucking great.”
Debbie’s throat burns like she’s been drinking. Her eyes sting like she’s been smoking. She remembers laughter, remembers liquor, remembers looking into Ruth’s eyes and feeling invincible.
“Yeah,” she whispers, before she can stop herself. “We were.”
Ruth grins. She hauls herself up into an awkward half-sitting position, leaning back heavily on her elbows, and she beams up at Debbie like that barely breathed confession was a pledge of complete and utter devotion.
Like it would have been, once, not even three months ago.
God, I miss you, Debbie thinks, and then, God, I hate you.
“We were so great,” Ruth slurs again. “Can I be your heel?”
Somewhere in the vodka-drowned slush of her brain, she must know the answer to that question already. Ruth can be stupid, can be self-destructive, can be both of those things at the same time, often without even realising it until it’s too late, but she’s not completely suicidal; she would never ask that question, not of Debbie, the woman whose life she destroyed in the dregs of alcohol just like this, the woman who threatened to throw her through a window just for saying hello to her at a party, if she didn’t know, or at least have some idea, that the answer was yes.
She has to know it’s decided. She has to know that goading her into the ring was a ‘yes’ in itself. She has to know that Debbie wouldn’t be here in the first place if she hadn’t already accepted the fact.
A tiny part of Debbie, the part that aches at the sight of a pitifully drunk Ruth lolling around and giggling on a filthy bathroom floor, wants to give her that. The ‘yes’, and the acceptance that it brings.
Another part of her, bigger and darker and crisscrossed with scars, the part that still feels the knife twisting in her guts when she thinks about Ruth and Mark, wants to kick her in the fucking head.
She doesn’t know which part she wants to win, and she’s pretty sure that neither of them would make for graceful losers, and so she pulls back from them both, puts her hands on her hips and thins her lips, and says, straight-faced and deadly serious, “That depends on whether you’re capable of staying out of character long enough to sober the fuck up.”
Ruth takes a long moment to consider that. She looks so thoughtful, furrowing her brows and crinkling her forehead, like Debbie’s just asked her to recite the complete works of fucking Shakespeare in chronological order or whatever other nerdy bullshit she gets off on these days. It’s infuriating, and it’s adorable, and it makes Debbie’s whole body seize up with cramps.
“I can try,” Ruth decides at last, nodding sagely. “But I’ll probably need to barf some more first.” She blinks a handful of times, then asks, in a voice so small Debbie almost doesn’t hear it, “Is that okay?”
Something about the look on her face, vulnerable and lopsided with drink, makes Debbie want to cry.
It also makes her want to turn around and storm out, slam the door behind her and never look back.
It also makes her want to fucking scream, but she doesn’t know whether that’s the anger or the pain.
She doesn’t do any of those things. But that’s only because she can’t choose between them.
“Fucking hell,” she mutters instead, and breathes as slow and steady as she can to chase away the memories clogging up her veins and making her heart stall. “I forgot how much of a goofball you are when you’re wasted.”
It’s been so long, she realises. Even before the shit hit the fan about Ruth and Mark, it had been a lifetime since they’d spent any real time together, outside of the occasional workout or phone call. Even before they had any reason to avoid each other, their orbits were missing and missing and missing, and fuck, it’s been so damn long since they got to be like this with each other, silly and simple, just a pair of goofballs made loose with drink.
Debbie knows why she cut back, obviously. She had a gruelling schedule on Paradise Cove, a long, exhausting commute from Pasadena, a manchild turned husband to contend with, and then, not so very much later, a pregnancy and a screaming baby, a life that didn’t have room for getting goofy or having fun, a life that barely had room for her in it at all.
She knows why she stopped, why she had to stop.
She never understood why Ruth stopped, though.
Ruth, who had nothing to go home to and no reason not to spend three nights in a row lying face-down in some sleazy back alley somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Ruth, who used to say that getting goofy with Debbie was the highlight of her day, her week, her month, her empty year. Ruth, who was free to drink herself unconscious every night if she wanted to, and Debbie, who could only live vicariously through her as work and Mark and Randy swallowed up more and more of her time, her life, her fucking soul.
Ruth, who Debbie hasn’t seen in this state since—
“I don’t drink so much any more,” Ruth whispers.
And fuck, that tears through Debbie like a bullet.
She looks down at Ruth, soused and senseless and clearly struggling to keep herself upright, and she thinks of her confessions, her excuses, the broken look on her face when she tried to justify sleeping with Mark, at least the first time.
“Were you this drunk when you fucked him?” she asks.
She doesn’t want to know. She really, really, really doesn’t want to know. But for some stupidly masochistic reason, she needs to.
Ruth swallows, turns pale. “Oh god, Debbie, not now.”
Debbie studies her closely. The sudden sickly pallour of her skin, the dark smudges under her eyes standing out much more starkly as the rest of her face drains of all its colour, the way she pushes herself up onto her knees and reels away, not with shame but with something else, something that looks a lot like pain.
Debbie knows pain, as intimately as she knows her own name.
She knows shame as well, and drunken regret. She knows—
“Jesus Christ, were you drunker than this when you fucked him?”
Ruth squeezes her eyes shut. “I’m going to throw up now.”
Which she does, and Debbie fleetingly considers joining her.
She doesn’t, obviously. She still has a few shreds of her dignity left, even if they are fraying thinner and thinner by the fucking second. But she does think about it for approximately three and a half seconds, which is approximately three and a quarter seconds longer than she spends wondering if she should hold Ruth’s hair back.
She doesn’t do that either. She doesn’t stroke her neck, doesn’t massage her shoulders or rub her back, doesn’t shush her or hold her steady, doesn’t do any of the countless other things she’s done for Ruth in countless moments like this, knowing that Ruth will likely end up doing exactly the same thing for her the next time.
She doesn’t ask, did Mark know how wasted you were?
She doesn’t ask, was he drunk too, or just an asshole?
She doesn’t ask, did that fucker even make you come?
She doesn’t ask—
She waits, stomach seething with sympathy, until Ruth groans and slumps back to the floor, then she asks, not really caring about the answer but knowing that she needs to ask something benign to keep those other, more dangerous questions at bay, “So what changed?”
Ruth hiccups, wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “Huh?”
Debbie grinds her teeth, biting down on the urge to swear, or to kick Ruth in the ribs until they snap. She’s looking just miserable enough that the act would be pointless, though, and honestly, that’s pretty much the only thing that stops her.
“All this,” she elucidates, waving a hand to take in... well, the whole fucking state of her, really. “Drinking four times your body weight in vodka, then coming to work and pissing off everyone in a hundred-mile radius. You’ve been doing such a great job lately of not getting shitfaced and fucking up the few meaningful relationships you have in your life, so why fall back into the same stupid shit now?”
“Oh.” Ruth sits up, grimaces, then flops back down. Her skull cracks loudly on the floor, and Debbie feels the vibration all through her body. “For you, obviously.”
“Obviously.” There’s no amusement behind the word, only a desperate, painful anger. “Because it turned out so fucking great for me the last time you did this?”
She holds on to that anger, that desperation and pain, as Ruth struggles upright again, more carefully this time if not any less uncoordinated. It’s so fucking hard to remember how much she hates the little homewrecker when she’s lying there looking like a drowned cat, sweat darkening the pale yellow of her stupid dress, the only thing close to formalwear she actually owns; it’s so hard not to let herself soften, not to give in to that awful feeling in her chest, the tug and the pull and the ache, when Ruth is gazing up at her with half-lidded eyes, vodka and water and the unfiltered adoration of the hopelessly, pathetically drunk.
Debbie has seen that look on her face before, and it drives a knife through her heart every damn time.
I don’t know what your vodka goggles are showing you, she wants to say, but it’s sure as hell not me.
“It wasn’t like that,” Ruth whines, then hiccups some more. “I wasn’t... I didn’t, like, go out and rob every liquor store in the Valley or whatever you think I was doing. I just... I wanted to be like...” She swallows a few times, rubbing at her sternum. “I was just trying to be a good Russian. Trying to be a good heel, you know? For your... for your face.”
“Right.” Debbie wills her features not to give away the ache in her heart. “For my face.”
“Yes!” Ruth’s shoulders jerk, thrown off-balance by her exuberance, but she catches herself before she can fall. “Your face is the best face, Debbie. It’s the most beautiful face in the whole wide world, and it deserves the best... the best...”
Debbie pinches the bridge of her nose. Her head is starting to pound. “The best heel?”
“The best everything,” Ruth declares, then her elbows sag and she hits the floor again.
Debbie’s heart clenches. It’s a different sensation from the other thing in her chest, the tug and the ache that pulls like pain at her lungs; it digs in deeper, cuts through cleaner, makes her feel not just like she can’t breathe but like she can’t move at all, like her whole body has been shrunk down and crammed into that one tiny space, beating breathlessly behind her ribs.
She feels like she’s drowning, or maybe like she’s already drowned, and there’s nothing she can do but stand there, gazing down at Ruth and trying so fucking hard to remember that she hates her.
She scrabbles for the anger, for the living, breathing taint of betrayal rusting deep down inside of her, but it’s not there. Hiding, probably, from that other part of her, the unbearable softness that devours everything else and swallows it whole. The things she wants and needs, the things that keep her alive are all gone, violence and hatred, the urge to break Ruth’s ribs and her jaw and her neck, and all that’s left are pain and nostalgia and the yearning, desperate look on Ruth’s face.
“Stop that.” It’s not the vicious snarl she was aiming for, dripping with vengeance and venom; it’s just a sigh, small and sad and stupidly soft. “You don’t get to do this shit any more, Ruth. You don’t get to reach into my fucking chest and rip out my fucking—” Her voice hitches, breaks; somehow, that’s the part that makes Ruth flinch. “You don’t get to look at me like that. You don’t get to talk to me like that. You gave up your right to do all that when you fucked my husband.”
Ruth makes a tiny sound, mostly lost to the filthy floor. “I know,” she mumbles. “I know that, Deb, I do.”
“Don’t—” Again, Debbie’s voice hitches; again, she hates herself. “I told you, don’t fucking call me that.”
If Ruth hears that, she ignores it. She doesn’t call her ‘Deb’ again, thank god, but she keeps going like Debbie never spoke at all. It’s almost worse, like being run over by a fucking truck, but it’s a strange kind of better too, leaving the hardest thing uncommented on.
“I know I’m not...” She swallows loudly, shuddering in a way that makes Debbie take a couple of hasty steps back. “I know we’re not friends. I know you’re not... you told me that, remember? At, uh... at Bash’s party. When you were me and I was... and I was you.”
Debbie quirks a brow, bemused in spite of herself. “You mean, when I was wasted and you were sober?”
“I took care of you,” Ruth whimpers, then rolls over so that she’s lying facedown, forehead sticking to the cold tile floor. “You don’t have to... you don’t have to do that for me, you don’t have to do anything for me ever again. But I’ll always do it for you. I’ll do whatever you need, anything, everything, and I’ll always take care of you. Even when you don’t want me to. Even when you... even if you hate me forever.”
Debbie’s guts twist, shame coiling hot and sharp in the pit of her stomach. She doesn’t remember very much about that shitty party, Bash’s ego-trip of a ‘get to know your new best friend and producer’ deal, but she remembers Ruth’s voice in her ear, warm with understanding as she helped Bash’s butler coax her into a cab. She doesn’t remember Bash, doesn’t remember the other girls, but she remembers Ruth’s arm around her waist, remembers the scratchy fabric of her sweater vest against her bare arms.
She remembers feeling safe, remembers feeling loved, and she remembers hating Ruth so fucking much for making her feel that way.
“I want that,” she admits, dropping back into her body from far, far away. “To hate you forever. Fuck, I want that more than anything.”
“I know,” Ruth says to the sticky floor. “So let me be your heel. I’ll be so good at it, Deb, I’ll—”
“Don’t fucking call me that! Jesus Christ, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times.”
“I’ll be so, so good for you,” Ruth burbles again, and Debbie is starting to suspect she’s ignoring her on purpose. “I will, I swear. I’ll make you hate me so much. I’ll make it so good for you, I’ll make it so easy, and then you’ll be able to kick my ass every day, just like... just like you want. And I’ll take it. I’ll take it all, Debbie, I’ll take everything.”
Debbie shuts her eyes. The screen of her eyelids flashes with old memories and new, still-fresh pains.
“You’re pathetic,” she makes herself say. “Seriously. Do you realise how fucking pathetic that sounds?”
“I do.” Ruth is still talking to the floor. “I mean it, though.”
Debbie snorts. “That’s just because you’re wasted.”
Ruth rolls over again, sits back up with an obvious effort.
“No,” she says, very quietly, “it’s not.”
She’s looking Debbie right in the eye as she says it, bleary and comically unfocused but so damn intense, like it’s the most important thing in the world to her, making sure Debbie hears and sees and understands what she’s trying to convey. Like she really thinks Debbie could hear anything else at all right now, here in this cramped, revolting locker room, like Ruth’s voice isn’t bouncing off the damn walls, punching her in the face again and again.
She doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to understand. She doesn’t want to have to look Ruth in the eye and see how much this — how much she — means to her. She doesn’t want—
She doesn’t want the pangs of pain tugging in her chest, the fine-pointed needles sliding in between her ribs to puncture her lungs, her heart, her fucking everything. She doesn’t want—
She doesn’t want to remember the dozens and dozens of times they’ve curled up together on shitty bathroom floors just like this, the dozens and dozens of times they’ve poured out their stupid drunken hearts to each other, spilling their souls like the cheap boxed wine that was all Ruth could afford, that Debbie swallowed her pride and drank, even though it tasted like shit, because she didn’t want to make her feel ashamed.
She doesn’t want to remember how it felt to fall into a drunken stupor with Ruth’s hair tickling her neck, Ruth’s breath tickling her cheek, Ruth’s arms loose and sleepy around her waist. She doesn’t want to remember a time when the tug in her chest came from love, not hate.
She doesn’t want to feel—
She doesn’t want to feel.
She sits down hard on the nearest bench, tailbone thunking painfully on the cracked wood, and says, feeling the truth of it cut through every atom of her body, “I can’t fucking breathe when you look at me like that.”
Ruth nods, sniffles. “I haven’t been able to breathe in weeks.”
Then she turns away, bends double, and starts puking again.
Debbie tells herself it’s practicality that launches her back up to her feet. She tells herself it’s consideration for the twelve other women who have to use this space and who would probably not appreciate Ruth staining and tainting and ruining it like she does everything else she touches.
She tells herself it’s just her stupid maternal reflexes kicking in, six months spent taking care of a volatile baby who likes to use her as his own personal barf bucket. She tells herself she’s just doing the sensible thing, the smart thing, the only thing she can do, shoving Ruth’s face into the nearest toilet as roughly as her hands will allow, because they both know who will be the one to clean up the mess if she misses.
She tells herself a lot of things that she knows aren’t true, and pretends they wash away the bitter taste in her mouth when her hands linger, of their own volition, at the nape of Ruth’s neck, holding back her hair and holding her steady.
It’s so familiar, so fucking comfortable. Which is a stupid, ridiculous thing to feel while on her knees on a filthy locker room floor, dressed in a leotard that cost more than Ruth’s last three paychecks combined, but hasn’t that always been the way things are with them? Stupid, ridiculous, completely fucking crazy, that’s them, that’s Debbie and Ruth, and there was once a time, far too long ago and not nearly long enough, when Debbie thought that was the most incredible feeling in the whole damn world.
She hates that there’s a part of her that still feels that way.
She hates that there’s another part of her that wants to keep feeling it, that wants to hold it close to her chest and never let it go, the nostalgia and the yearning and the memories that refuse to die. She hates that there’s a part of her that wants to freeze-frame this nightmare of a moment, to pin it up on the cracked, patched-up wall of her heart and pretend it’s the familiar, comfortable thing it once was, the thing it should still be.
She hates those parts of herself, and she hates Ruth most of all, for bringing them out in her so easily, so effortlessly, just by being who she is.
She wants to drive her knee into Ruth’s back, bruise her ribs on the porcelain. She wants to ball her fists in her hair, yank her spine back until it snaps in two, until there’s nothing left of her but bone shards and fragments of a shattered friendship. She wants to make this hurt, wants to make her suffer.
Ruth is small under her, and vulnerable. She could do that.
Instead, she sighs, strokes Ruth’s hot, sweaty neck, and mutters, “I wish I could heave up my heart as easily as you’re heaving up a continent’s worth of vodka.”
Ruth lifts her head. “If it helps,” she gurgles, barely coherent, “I think my heart’s in there somewhere too.” She belches pitifully. “And my lungs. And my liver.”
In spite of herself, Debbie huffs a laughs at that. It’s a short, sharp jolt of thing, a shudder of involuntary mirth that immediately makes her want to scream, and she’s almost grateful for the fact that Ruth isn’t done emptying herself, that she’s already ducking her head back down before she’s even finished speaking, that the loud rebellion of her stomach covers up the tidal wave of almost-tears that surges up to flood the air out of Debbie’s throat.
“Jesus Christ.” It’s an expletive not a prayer, and it comes out soaked in salt. “You’re such a fucking lightweight.”
Proving her point rather effectively, it takes Ruth several long and very unpleasant minutes to finish hurling up her guts. She’s panting by the time she’s done, shoulders shaking under Debbie’s hands, and when she finally summons the strength to speak again, the words that come out are almost more sour than the vodka.
“I am,” she mumbles, straightening up and wiping the sweat from her drenched brow. “But I’m your lightweight.”
Debbie closes her eyes, swallows down the rising gorge of her heart. She wants so desperately to feel nothing but anger and hate, the bitter resentment and violent betrayal of a woman who was torn apart by the one person she trusted to keep her together. She wants so badly to desire nothing more than all the brutal, vicious things she’s fantasised about doing to Ruth; she wants to hate her, wants to hurt her, but at the same time she wants to fucking hold her, and that burns so much hotter, hits so much harder, than all the hate and hurt in the whole damn world.
“You’re not...” Her voice betrays her, a clean, keen fracture straight down the middle that rings like a funeral knell in the tight, close space. “You’re not mine, Ruth.”
Not any more, she can’t bring herself to add, though the truth of it thrums all through her body like a second heartbeat, a second network of overstimulated nerves.
Ruth turns away from the toilet, slides down until she’s sitting with her back to the cool porcelain.
“I am,” she says again, breathless and flushed with exertion. “I know you don’t want me, Debbie. I know that, and I get it, I do. But I’m yours anyway. Your lightweight, your heel, your...” She breaks off, whimpering softly, and this time when she turns away it’s only to hide her face. “Your everything.”
Debbie shakes her head, swallows down the hurt, the hate, the tears.
You’re not, she tries to say again, but the words won’t fucking come.
“You can be my heel,” her voice says, without her permission. “You can be my punching bag in the ring. You can be my nemesis or my villain or whatever else the show needs you to be. But that’s it, that’s all. I don’t want any of that other shit. I don’t want...” She swallows, feels the pulling ache behind her ribs ease up just a little, like it’s taking a hand off her heart to wave a white flag. “I don’t want anything else from you.”
I don’t want you to make me feel like this, she thinks she means. I don’t want you to make me want you back.
Ruth seems to understand that. Her gaze is a little less bleary now that she’s purged herself of the brunt of the booze, and there’s a painful sort of clarity in her voice when she rasps, hoarse but steady, “Okay, Debbie.”
Debbie massages her chest. Her ribs creak under her palm. “Make me hate you,” she says. “Make it real.”
Ruth bites her lip, musters a shaky nod. She’s blinking rapidly now, not with the drunken disorientation of a moment ago, but with something else, something painful and devastatingly familiar. Debbie feels a tiny crack spread like a spiderweb inside of her, a fracture of recognition, of resonance, and the part of her that isn’t clinging to the hate and the hurt, the part that is soft and small and too sweet to swallow down, yearns for the strength — the weakness — to take her hopeless mess of a friend into her arms, like she’s done so many times before, and never, ever, ever let her go.
“I can do that,” Ruth says, still blinking wetly. “I think...” She swallows, and this time it’s not her stomach she’s holding down but her heart. “I think making you hate me is the only real thing I’ve ever done.”
Debbie fills her lungs, feels the pull and the ache return to her chest as they empty themselves. Her heart hurts, her ribs creak, and she looks down at Ruth, the woman who ruined her life, the woman she can’t seem to let go, no matter how hard she tries, and whispers, so softly she hopes Ruth won’t hear it, “God, I wish that was true.”
Ruth is just about sober enough to walk in a straight line by the time Debbie hauls her ass out of the locker room.
Melrose, naturally, is waiting right outside the door. She’s not smiling, but there’s an unsettling sort of calm about her, limbs and body loose and ready, like she’s spent the last ten minutes or so stretching out and warming up for a bloody battle royale. Somehow, the coolness makes Debbie more nervous than if she’d come at them with bared teeth and bared fists.
“Oh, good,” she deadpans, looking Ruth up and down like she’s appraising a side of beef. “You’re still alive.”
Ruth’s brows knit in confusion. “Was... um, was I not supposed to be?”
Debbie huffs out a tired sigh. “There was some debate on the subject.”
Ruth doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that. She still looks confused, but there’s a tragic sort of surprise mixed in there now too, like her soused brain can’t wrap itself around the idea that they were talking about her, that any one of these women, much less all of them, would give a shit if she choked to death on her own drunken vomit, like she can’t fathom ever meaning that much to anyone.
Like she’s only ever meant anything to one person in her whole life.
Debbie knows that look, has lived and breathed that look, and it never fails to gut her like a damn fish.
Melrose looks Ruth up and down, eyes narrowed, like she’s trying to pinpoint the best places to strike.
“You feeling better?” she asks, dangerously neutral.
Ruth blinks a handful of times, shrugs. “Somewhat.”
“Drink lots of water,” Arthie suggests. She’s moved to the other side of the gym, her slender frame sandwiched between Reggie and Tammé. Debbie envies their safe distance, envies their safety in numbers. “Your body will thank you in the morning.”
Ruth opens her mouth, closes it again with a dutiful nod. Obedient, pliant, typical Ruth Wilder.
Debbie wants to slap her until she grows a backbone. She wants to revel in her spinelessness.
She wants—
“Awesome.”
Melrose’s voice is sharp, biting; it cuts through Debbie’s thoughts, cuts her clean down to the bone. She’s still looking at Ruth like prey, like she’s her next meal and she can’t quite figure out if it’s worth the effort to chew her up before swallowing. It makes Debbie feel hungry too, and it makes her feel protective, fierce and feral in a way that makes her knees go weak.
Ruth is still blinking owlishly at Melrose. “Is it?” she asks, with the wavering uneasiness of someone who senses, if a little sluggishly, that she’s in terrible danger.
“Sure.” Melrose flashes her teeth; it’s definitely not a smile. “And hey, since we’re being such a great team and sharing drinking tips and whatever, here’s another one for you.” Her features harden, as sudden as the flipping of a switch, and she takes a long, threatening step forwards. “If you ever, and I mean ever, pull a stunt like that again, there won’t be enough left of you to fill a matchbox. You feel me?”
Debbie is still supporting most of Ruth’s weight, tucked in small but muscle-heavy against her side, so she feels it when Ruth flinches, a shudder so tight and so close it might as well be happening in her own body too.
“I...” She works her jaw; Debbie hears the click as the joint pops, feels the tension ripple through her, and she can’t figure out if she wants to hold her tighter until it stops or shake her and make it worse. “I’m sorry?”
It comes out like a question. Melrose is not impressed.
“Are you, though?” she sneers. “Are you really?”
Ruth swallows thickly. Debbie sighs, holds her steady.
“I don’t...” She’s still slurring a little, no doubt from some combination of vodka and confusion, and possibly the gut-punch of being accosted less than two steps out of the bathroom; she clears her throat, swallows a few more times, then tries again. “I don’t make good decisions. I don’t... I can’t always see the, um... the line, you know? Until I’ve already crossed it.”
The words kick at the small of Debbie’s back, like a kidney punch aimed to bring her down hard and fast. She’s not sure if Ruth has any idea of what she’s supposed to be apologising for, if she even remembers her stupid stint as the ‘Orthodox Warrior’ that got Melrose so pissed off in the first place; she doesn’t know if she remembers anything at all from the seconds, minutes, hours before Debbie goaded her drunk, useless ass into the ring and gave her everything she ever wanted.
She doesn’t know if Ruth has enough of her faculties still intact to guess at which of her many, many, many bad decisions she’s supposed to be apologising for this time, but the words land so hard, with such painful pinpoint precision, right to the most vulnerable parts of Debbie’s soul, it doesn’t matter at all.
Well. It doesn’t matter to Debbie, who feels sucker-punched regardless.
Somewhat understandably, it matters a damn sight more to Melrose.
“No shit,” she says flatly, then points a pristinely manicured finger up towards Sam’s office, directing all their attention to where the man himself is leaning over the rail, watching the drama unfold with a shit-eating grin on his stupid moustachioed face. “He’s the director. We’re getting paid to take this racist, sexist, antisemitic shit from him. We’re not getting paid to take it from each other.”
Rather than attempt to defend himself, or justify his choices as ‘artistic vision’ or whatever, Sam just offers a cheery wave. Debbie can’t figure out whether she admires his balls or just wants to cut them off, but it’s kind of refreshing either way, to feel a pulse of irritation at someone other than Ruth.
Ruth, meanwhile, is still looking at Melrose. She takes a deep breath, wobbles a couple of steps away from Debbie, and tries to stand up straight under her own power. She’s not particularly steady, but she’s not tripping over her own feet either, which is about ten notches up from how she was a couple of minutes ago; it’s good enough, Debbie decides, and shuffles back to let the two of them face each other alone.
Underneath her leotard, her skin flares with goosebumps, cold and prickling with the absence of Ruth’s body, her warmth, her presence.
Debbie bites her tongue, shoves that feeling down.
Hoarse but sincere, Ruth says, “I’m sorry, Melrose.”
Melrose doesn’t look placated, but she does look mildly amused. By her standards, that’s practically a standing ovation.
“Fuck me,” she mutters, an exclamation not an invitation. “You’d get on your knees for just about anyone, wouldn’t you?”
This time, Ruth doesn’t flinch. “I hurt a lot of people,” she says, and Debbie feels several pairs of eyes turn on her. “It’s fair.”
Is it, Debbie wonders, schooling her features into cold indifference, willing her feelings not to scrawl themselves in permanent marker across the lines of her face. Is it fair that Ruth can screw around with people’s lives, their identities, their hearts and their souls and their everything, and then try to pave over the pain she caused with a sad face and a sloshed, shamefaced ‘I’m sorry’?
The damage is still there, isn’t it? Covering up the fractures and shattered pieces doesn’t make them go away, won’t ever make them go away. ‘I’m sorry’ doesn’t undo any of the shitty things she’s done. How is it fair that she can just apologise and then act like that’s enough?
The anger swells in her chest again, the curdled-milk sourness of hate and hurt and violent revenge fantasies. A part of her welcomes it, finds comfort in the familiarity, the sure-footedness of knowing where she stands inside her own heart; another part, the part that remembers holding Ruth’s hair back just five minutes ago, feels like it’s in mourning.
She wonders how many different people can live in a single body in a single moment. She wonders if she will ever be able to reconcile those two clashing parts of herself, the wronged and wounded woman who lost everything at the hands of the person she trusted — the person she loved — more than anyone else in the world, and the soft-hearted, yearning, aching ruin of a person who wants nothing in the world more than to be able to hold her best friend in her arms again without feeling her heart shatter.
Melrose is lucky, she thinks. She can hate freely, without the burden of remembering how it felt to love.
Melrose doesn’t really look hateful any more, though. She looks thoughtful, contemplative in a way that might be comical in a different situation, but here and now is anything but. She looks like she’s trying to gauge Ruth’s sincerity, her integrity, her definition of ‘fair’. She looks like she’s giving serious weight to her words, like maybe it would be enough after all, the fumbling apology for something she probably doesn’t even remember, so long as it was honest.
So long as it was real.
Debbie’s heart aches.
Melrose says, slowly, “You’re really sorry?”
Ruth takes a deep breath. “I really am.”
Melrose hums. Nods. Cracks her knuckles.
Then, without even a split-second’s warning, she closes the two paces between them, draws back her arm, and punches Ruth right in the face.
Ruth’s head snaps back. She grunts, coughs, but doesn’t go down. Debbie watches, feeling strangely numb, like she’s falling out of her body.
Ruth massages her cheek. She doesn’t say, what was that for?
She doesn’t say, I don’t think I deserved that.
She doesn’t say, we could have resolved this without violence.
She just says, scarcely above a whisper, “Ow.”
Melrose rolls her eyes, shaking out her hand with the kind of grimace that suggests she not-so-secretly wants to say ‘ow’ as well. She doesn’t, obviously, because she’s stubborn and self-important, but there’s a note of something uncharacteristically close to admiration when she grouses, tight with bravado, “Fucking glass jaw.”
Ruth doesn’t say anything. Debbie is faintly aware of the other girls chattering amongst themselves on the other side of the ring, is faintly aware of Sam making some snide remark or another about catfights making the very best television, is vividly aware of the fact that someone — that she, Debbie, specifically — should probably step up and tell Melrose she’s made her point now and needs to back the hell off.
No-one punches my heel but me, she could say, as Liberty Belle.
Or, as herself, more truthfully, no-one punches my Ruth but me.
Her stomach turns. Her chest feels like it’s collapsing. She feels—
She doesn’t get the chance to feel very much of anything.
She’s barely even crawled back into her body, has barely even had time to parse whatever the fuck just happened, much less make sense of the weird way it resonated in her gut, protective and possessive and a hundred other things, when Melrose lunges for Ruth again, too fast for anyone, least of all Debbie, to try and stop her.
Thankfully, she doesn’t punch her this time.
She doesn’t kick her, beat her, threaten her.
She just smacks a big wet kiss right in the middle of her forehead and declares, grinning like a madwoman, “Apology accepted, bitch.”
Ruth opens and shuts her mouth, gaping like a goldfish. “Uh...”
Debbie feels like she’s losing her damn mind. “What the fuck?”
Melrose smirks at her, arches one perfectly pencilled eyebrow.
“What’s your problem?” she asks, like Debbie’s bafflement isn’t a totally reasonable response to this complete and total insanity. “Not everything has to be some great big melodramatic soap opera, you know.”
Debbie gnaws on the inside of her cheek. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.” Melrose shrugs, then smirks some more. “Sometimes you just need to call a bitch out on her shit, punch her in the face, then say ‘yeah, okay, we’re cool now’ and move on with your fucking life.” She cuts a glance back at Ruth, clicking her tongue and winking lasciviously, presumably just to make her as uncomfortable as possible. “Ain’t that right, Ruthie?”
Ruth looks like she’s having a stroke. “This has been a really weird day,” is all she gets out.
Debbie is no less befuddled. “Just five minutes ago, you were ready to fucking murder her.”
“Uh huh.” Melrose rolls her shoulders, stretches out her limbs, long and lazy. “And then, like four minutes ago, she apologised. Took it on the chin. Literally.”
She yawns, loud and obnoxious, clearly trying to push Debbie’s buttons. Debbie hates that it has exactly that effect, hates that she can feel her fucking blood pressure start to rise, feel the veins throbbing in her neck. She hates that Melrose can see it, hates that everyone else can probably see it too. Hates, more than all those things put together, that Ruth knows her so fucking well she doesn’t need to see it at all.
“And that’s...” She shakes her head. “What, that’s it? All is forgiven?”
Melrose cocks her head to the side. “What else do you want me to do?” she demands, more amused than annoyed. “Make her wallow in her juvenile bullshit for the rest of her natural life? Make myself fucking miserable dwelling on it for the rest of my natural life?” She barks a harsh laugh, waves a hand like she’s dismissing Debbie’s entire point, and her along with it. “Please. I got better shit to do with my time.”
Debbie’s heart is pounding. Her ribs feel like they’re being split, pulled apart and bent back until they snap, until there’s nothing left but jagged bits of shrapnel that pierce her lungs and drive out all the air.
She looks at Melrose, bouncing from violence to indifference to flirtation like it’s the easiest thing in the goddamn world. She looks at Ruth, swaying on her feet, reeling from violence and vodka alike, desperately trying to hold herself in one piece. She looks back and forth between them, the woman she hates and the woman who just punched her and forgave her in the same damn heartbeat, and she feels—
“That’s not how it works,” she croaks, sounding as hoarse and hopeless as poor, pathetically drunk Ruth.
Melrose huffs. “Not for you,” she snickers, then suddenly softens. “But it could be, if you wanted it to be.”
And just like that, Debbie feels like she’s the one who just got punched.
Her vision blurs as she turns back to look at Ruth, automatic and instinctive, the way she always does and always has, for as long as they’ve known each other. The flickering gym lights are suddenly much too bright, garish and nearly blinding; they make it hard to focus, hard to make out the pale blur of Ruth’s face, the sweat-stained yellow of her dress, the dark curls of her hair where it falls over her eyes, hiding the water Debbie knows, knows, knows is pooling there.
Ruth’s mouth is moving, shaping her name, or half of it, over and over.
“That’s not how it works,” Debbie says again. It comes out louder this time, harsher and rougher, and there’s not a single person in the gym who believes she’s still talking to Melrose. “Apologies aren’t enough. Fucking ‘sorry’ isn’t enough. You can’t just punch someone in the face and forget how much it hurt when they punched you in the fucking heart. You can’t just...” Her breath stalls, stutters, then stops completely; for a fraction of a second, brief but terrifying, she’s absolutely convinced that she’s dying. “Don’t you think I would if I could?”
She blinks back the salt, the sting, blinks back the harsh lights still blurring her vision, forces her eyes to focus just in time to watch as Ruth stumbles, sways, and falls to her knees, eyes wide and cheeks wet.
“Would you?” she asks, in the tiniest voice Debbie’s ever heard.
Melrose’s hand is on Ruth’s shoulder, rubbing firm little circles with her thumb. It’s a surreal sight, given what just happened between them, insanity right on the line between comedy and tragedy, and Debbie doesn’t know whether she’s supposed to laugh or cry, whether she should hate Melrose for offering comfort to the wrong person, or admire her for being so much gentler and stronger than she herself could ever be.
“You’ll get there,” Melrose says, with uncharacteristic softness. Debbie can’t tell which one of them she’s speaking to, but she thinks perhaps it doesn’t matter. “Might take a few more punches for you, though.”
Debbie wants to believe that, so fucking badly.
Well, no. A part of Debbie wants to believe it.
The part that held Ruth’s hair back while she vomited up four times her body weight in vodka, the part that yearns and aches for that tug in her chest, the part that feels it slide in between her ribs like needles, like rope, like weapons that call themselves tools. The part that remembers a lifetime of liquor and laughter and love, a thousand nights and a thousand morning-afters spent picking each other up from a thousand filthy bathroom floors. The part that wants to hold the woman who once meant everything to her and not imagine breaking her bones, the part that misses her best friend, her Ruth, her—
You’re not mine, she snarled at her before, in the locker room, and the part of her that balked even as she said it, aching and yearning and so fucking lonely, wonders how many punches it would take, how many clotheslines or suplexes or lockups she’d have to do to go back to the time when those words weren’t true, when Ruth really was hers, and she was Ruth’s in turn, and that was the only thing in the world that mattered.
That’s just one part of her, though.
The rest of her...
The rest of her is still living in the nightmare that Ruth left behind after she slept with Mark. The rest of her is still hurting, still reeling, still picking the broken-glass fragments of her fucking heart out of the carpet of a house she doesn’t even live in any more.
That part doesn’t care how many punches it would take for them to ‘get there’, how much violence it would take to twist all that hate and hurt into catharsis, into healing, into forgiveness or reconciliation or learning to move the fuck on. That part just wants to see Ruth bleed.
Debbie doesn’t know which part of her she wants to win. She doesn’t know which part should win, which part is more right than the other, which part matters more.
She just knows that when she looks down at Ruth now, drunk and dizzy and on her knees in front of her, with Melrose of all fucking people holding her steady, the pain that tears through her chest isn’t just hate but love as well.
A few more punches for you, Melrose said, and the violent, hateful, wounded part of Debbie relishes the promise of all that blood, and the aching, yearning, nostalgic part of her blooms and bursts with hope that the number is small.
Either way, she supposes it all ends in the same damn place.
Debbie looks up at the ring, the mats, the ropes, the turnbuckles. Scripted violence, scripted pain.
She looks down at Ruth, on her knees, hears her own voice snarl, make me hate you, make it real.
She looks up at Melrose, blunt fists and sharp wits, as quick to forgive as she is to throw punches.
She looks down at herself and doesn’t know what she sees.
Slowly, effortfully, Ruth stumbles back up onto her feet. She’s still wobbly, still swaying from side to side like she doesn’t quite know which way is up, but Melrose’s hand is sure and steady on her shoulder, stronger and kinder than Debbie’s could ever be, and it keeps her standing, keeps her in one piece.
She wets her lips. Blinks once, swallows twice. Says, “Deb?”
Debbie’s throat burns. Her stomach turns. The aching, yearning thing in her chest gives another tug, another needle-sharp pull. It’s so profound, so painful, so fucking much that it almost makes her fall to the floor, crash down onto her knees in the very same spot Ruth was just a moment ago.
Don’t call me that, she thinks. Don’t you dare.
But this time she doesn’t say it.
She doesn’t say anything at all.
She bares her teeth, balls her fists, and nods.
—