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I really don’t know what "I love you" means
I think it means "don’t leave me here alone”
― Neil Gaiman, Adventures in the Dream Trade
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Charlotte is the first to find her, in the end.
She’s always been able to find her.
It's the breath before the fall, and she’s here. Amelia wonders if there’s a tether between them, something that tugs on Charlotte’s ribs in these moments, something sharp.
She hears her shoes before she even opens her mouth to speak.
“It’s late,” her friend says, and Amelia just nods because she’s not wrong. If she doesn’t look up, all she can see is Charlotte’s heels on the tarmac in front of her. It is late, and she doesn’t know how she’s in Seattle right now, how the other woman even knew she’d be here. Lucky guess, maybe.
A silent tug on something invisible.
“Yeah,” she says, barely louder than a breath. “Sorry.”
She’s not sure what she’s apologising for. A lot, too much. She’d shouted at Richard today, needs to apologise to him for that. But not now, not when she can barely think around the white noise in her mind.
Charlotte tilts her head to one side as Amelia looks up from her seat on the curb, and she's always had the distinct impression that the other woman can read her mind. There’s not another explanation that makes sense, at least not now, not here.
“You haven’t taken anything.”
Charlotte isn’t asking her this, and Amelia doesn’t bother wondering how she knows. That one’s easier to guess, easier to understand.
Well it takes one to know one.
Isn’t that what she’d said, all those years ago?
It feels like a hundred years ago now. She’d been a different person, but there’s a part of her that sometimes feels like she’s back there, stuck there.
“No,” Amelia says, and she’s been sitting on this curb for hours now, just watching the sun go down, listening to the people walk to and from the bar a few hundred metres down the street. Even when she’d been drinking, bars hadn’t really held an appeal. Too many people, too much tension running high in the air. But it's all she can think about right now. “No I haven’t”
“You’re sober.”
“You think I’d still be sitting here if I wasn’t?”
It’s a sharp question, and the words are out before she can pull them back. Amelia feels a flash of deja vu, a flash of memory that takes her back to a girl in an intervention screaming at her friends.
It’s a lifetime ago, eternity ago. The memories still follow her though, they turn up in her dreams sometimes too.
Silence falls for a moment, the question hanging between them, and she knows Charlotte can sense the unspoken words, can feel them simmering in the air.
“Addison called me and explained,” she tells her eventually, and Amelia just nods because that makes sense too.
“Did she tell you everything?” The question is so quiet that she wonders for a moment if Charlotte actually hears her. But the answer comes a second later, and it’s laced with something achingly sad.
“She did.”
“My brother died,” Amelia whispers, and Charlotte doesn’t say anything, just sits down beside her. There’s a part of her that recognises the jacket she’s wearing, maybe it’s something expensive.
She sits down anyway. Amelia can feel something aching in her chest, in her throat. It hurts more than she expects it to. But then again, she’s spent the best part of a year trying desperately not to feel anything at all.
And now they’re here, and Charlotte is balancing on this hair trigger line with her, trying desperately to stop her from slipping.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to feel that,” Amelia says, and she can hear it in her own voice, how close to a breaking point she is, a supernova, some sort of timeless collapse. “I can’t.”
Another beat of silence, this one is somehow heavier. “I know.”
“Why are you here, Charlotte.”
It’s not a question, not really.
“To check up on you.”
“I’m fine, I’m always fine, right?” Amelia blinks, everything blurs, and she doesn’t really know when she started crying, but the sudden warmth of the tears is a shock for a split second. People have been breaking and struggling to heal over and over for centuries. Maybe this is coded into her cells, built into her DNA. “Right?”
Charlotte’s eyes are shadowed with something she can’t make out, but there’s something soft in her voice as she shifts, shifts so that she’s crouching directly in front of her, shifts so that she can't avoid it.
“If I leave now, you’ll be in that bar in an hour.”
“Maybe you should let me do that,” Amelia says, but there’s no fight in it, no venom, no real strength to the words. The world is made up of fractured glass, blue eyes that she’ll only ever see in the mirror now, tears that burn and burn and burn. “Just leave me alone.”
“No.”
“Why not,” she whispers and this just hurts now, waves of it crashing over her and all she wants to do is scream. “Why the hell not.”
“Because I love you,” Charlotte says quietly, “enough that I can’t watch you destroy yourself again.”
She has nothing to say to that, nothing that she can form into words anyway. But she also isn’t sure that she has to speak, doesn’t even have to say what she’s thinking for her friend to understand, to see.
“You drink to try and take away the pain, to numb it. You always have,” Charlotte continues softly, and Amelia feels cool hands on her face, tilting it up to face her, and she’s brushing away tears, something achingly gentle in her expression. “But when you try to numb one thing, you end up taking out the rest of it. Joy, love, hope. It all goes away too.”
“I can’t breathe around this anymore,” she murmurs, leaning into Charlotte’s palm, and everything hurts, and she’s too tired to even open her eyes. “I can’t think.”
“You don’t have to think,” the other woman says, smoothing back her hair gently, and she feels like something in her chest is finally giving out, caving in. Maybe this is what they call rock bottom. She wonders how many times she can hit it before the universe calls it quits. “Not yet, not now, not in this moment. You just have to not drink, and not take anything else. All you have to do, one day at a time, is get through this, and keep breathing.”
“I feel like I’m losing a part of myself,” Amelia admits into the quiet of the night, because it’s easy here. Because Charlotte, more than anyone else in the world, understands this. “Or maybe I’ve already lost it.”
“Amelia,” the other woman says, and there’s nothing weak about it. She thinks that there is something in Charlotte King’s DNA that has been coded and cobbled together with steel. “Look at me.”
She looks at her, because there’s nothing left to do, nowhere left to hide. She feels like her nerves are fraying apart, like she's a half second away from crawling out of her fucking skin, from screaming and screaming and screaming until the world ends.
So she looks.
Charlotte’s gaze is steady. It has always been steady, and Amelia realises in this moment that it probably always will be. She has never faltered, not in all the time they’ve known each other, all these years.
“You can survive this,” Charlotte tells her, thumbs brushing across her cheekbones, and the night tastes of salt and rain. When she lets herself focus on it, the cold takes her breath away, sharpens everything into clearer focus. “You are going to survive this.”
“I’m tired,” Amelia whispers, “I can’t.”
“You can,” she says, and there is no hint of doubt, no hesitation, nothing but certainty. “One day at a time, one minute at a time. You can. I know you, I’ve seen it.”
“I don’t even know who I am anymore,” she says, and the admission feels like a wall breaking down, it feels like cracks in already splintered glass, but it also feels a little easier to breathe.
“You’re the same person you’ve always been,” Charlotte says softly. “There’s nothing broken, nothing fractured beyond repair. You’re a surgeon, you fix people for a living. You know what irreversible damage looks like Amelia, and this is not it.”
She closes her eyes then, swallowing against the rising scream because if she starts crying again now she’ll never stop, it will never stop.
“I don’t want to numb joy,” Amelia breathes, and her hands are shaking, she can feel it where Charlotte’s grip is still warm around her fingers. “I don’t want to, I never wanted to. I just don’t know if I can-”
“I know,” her friend says, the only person she’s never had to explain anything to, the person who sees it, sees all of it. “I know.”
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly, and she doesn’t really know what she’s saying sorry for but it feels important, it feels somehow vital.
Charlotte just shakes her head, and she’s a force of nature coiled into human form, and Amelia thinks she can feel a flare of something warm in her chest, something flickering to life between her ribs.
“There’s nothing to apologise for, not to me okay? You can do this.” There is no hint of doubt, no hesitation, nothing but certainty. “One day at a time, one damn minute at a time.”
Amelia breathes, forces herself to inhale once, exhales slowly. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat until it gets a little easier. “There are a lot of minutes.”
“Which is why they tell you to shrink down that perspective,” Charlotte says with a faint smile. There’s a tiny hint of relief there too. “Call your sponsor, go to a meeting, talk to someone, get through the day.”
“She’s in New York right now,” she murmurs, closing her eyes, suddenly more exhausted than she’s been all year. “I didn't want to-”
“If you use the words ‘bother her’ right now,” Charlotte says gently, grip on her arms tightening as she pulls them both to their feet, “I’ll kick your ass.”
Amelia laughs shakily, and it still feels like the world is ending, but her fingers curl around Charlotte’s sleeve, and there’s a comfort there, a quiet warmth in her bones. They stand there for a long time, just breathing in the cold air of the night.
"You can't stay here forever," Amelia says eventually, everything is so quiet still, and Charlotte's smile is soft enough that it feels like she's breaking in half.
"Perspective. And you can't get rid of me that easily."
"Cooper-"
"Can bring the kids up, can come and stay for as long as it takes," Charlotte brushes a strand of hair out of her eyes, touch lingering on the side of her face. Her hands are warm. "I'm not going anywhere."
Amelia just nods, and she's too tired to argue, too tired to think about this now, to think about anything really. They can revisit the conversation in the morning, revisit it another day.
"Do the next indicated action, right?" she says quietly, and the other woman just hums in agreement, a faint approval in her eyes. Amelia can feel the fabric of her jacket, and it's soft under her fingertips. Charlotte steadies them both on the worn tarmac, eases the pressure, steadies the fault lines.
She’s always been able to steady her, to find her.
“Right.”
Amelia leans into her, leans into that warmth, and Charlotte pulls her into a hug without question. There was a time, a while ago, when it would’ve been a smile at best. She doesn’t think either of them used to be inclined to hug but-
But things change, sometimes without her noticing, without any explanation or warning. So she relaxes into it, rests her head on Charlotte’s shoulder and blinks against the sudden burning in her eyes.
The other woman is made up of sharp angles and expensive perfume, and her hair smells like vanilla. She’s strong, Amelia can feel the quiet strength in this, feels it when her grip tightens slightly. She wants to ask how Charlotte is so good at holding the world together after it should’ve all come crashing down a hundred times over by now, but she’s tired, can't work out how to ask that and have it make any kind of sense.
So Amelia just closes her eyes instead, focuses on the smell of vanilla, and keeps breathing.
_____________
The aim is to balance the terror of being alive with the wonder of being alive.”
― Carlos Castaneda