Renee was crocheting between practices. She had learned while doing the orientation for the program she had joined that matched people in domestic violence shelters with college campuses that sold their handmade hats, scarves, and gloves at farmers markets, bake sales, sports games, and university sanctioned events. She was only still in it because it was one of the first clubs she had joined at PSU. There were some archaic funding rules that made her blood hot. Like a quota of items that had to be produced before the semester started. As if the participants lived on a student’s schedule that freed up their summer months for knitting and crocheting.
Hence the growing pile of hats next to her.
Her slight frustration rushed away when Allison flooded into the dorm room with a large iced coffee and three huge shopping bags. Renee doubted that Allison had found the amount of clothes the bags suggested she had in the time between afternoon and morning practices. She found she was right when Allison unceremoniously dumped the bags inside the bedroom door. So Allison still hadn’t replaced her laundry basket. You would think that Allison would care more about putting away her clothes but her ignorance towards the importance household chores persisted where Dan and Renee couldn’t claim personal grievance against it. Renee found it overly endearing.
“Renee? I didn’t see you.”
Allison rounded the couch with a furrow between her brows. Renee smiled at her. Allison wrinkled her nose and went to retrieve her drink.
Renee thought about it, then moved her hats to the coffee table so Allison could sit next to her if she wanted. She also took out her single earbud and tapped off the subtle instrumental she was listening to.
Allison came back and unbuttoned her tight, light-wash high waisted jeans as soon as she sat down. She eyed the work in progress Renee was handling with a raised eyebrow and popped her straw in her mouth.
“Why are you fighting the yarn?”
Renee had always suspected that she crocheted aggressively. She dragged a thread through the too tight loop of her slip knot, thinking it would all be smoother if the hook was a little sharper.
“I’m beginning to think the yarn is fighting me, actually.”
“Then you’re losing sweetie.” Allison made a few moves to deposit herself closer to Renee. It could not be called scooting. “But you do you.”
They had all wanted to get some new furniture, things they would be excited to split up at the end of their senior year, that they could take with them and put in new apartments after they graduated. One addition was a couch that reclined. Allison lifted her legs expectantly and Renee dropped her work to pop the stand. She didn’t bother picking it back up until Allison curled into her side, head on Renee’s shoulder, the hand holding her phone on Renee’s stomach.
Allison was flush against her.
She had to pull herself up a little to crochet properly. Allison’s head slipped down to her upper arm and she sighed, put-upon, but otherwise didn’t complain. Renee started up again and Allison briefly put her phone down to unravel the yarn so there was more stretch.
Renee focused on being more gentle with the hat.
“I want to do something like this.” Renee glances down to the clear view she has of Allison’s instagram feed. It was a picture of lips, painted to look like rose petals and practically set in resin. Â
“Those are lovely.” Â
Allison hums like she does when she’s pleased. She kept scrolling.
“You’d wear this.” Allison shows her a white dress embroidered with daisies. It poofed out like an upside down dandelion.
“Everyday if I could get away with it. You know, we should get some flowers for the room. We could keep flowers in the room all year.”
“Maybe.” Allison agreed easily. Allison would probably enjoy shopping for vases. Renee considered the needless detritus that would fill the dorm with a constant onslaught of fresh flowers.
“Or maybe we could start a little garden by the window and grow herbs and flowers.”
“My sweet little dreamer.” Allison mocked with the air of an old routine.
Renee smiled. “I might actually get to it this year.”
Renee was thinking lofty thoughts about how she was going to drop a few commitments. Spend more time doing a sweet kind of nothing. Alone, if she could manage it. She smiled, but the plan still made her stomach twist warningly.
Allison lifted a knee over Renee and slotted her head more firmly between her collarbone and chest.
Allison had started going bra-less most days outside of practice, claiming the heat too much to deal with a bra and the pop of her nipples through a thin top as accessories. Today there was a soft orange crop top,  tight and sleeveless, thick but not so much that Allison’s nipples couldn’t dent the fabric.
Allison bra-less made Renee a little bit insane.
Renee acknowledged this calmly as she kept up her rhythm with increased focus, the soft hint of curves and weight a powerful but manageable distraction.
She felt the change in Allison’s next breath. Her eyes found the phone screen first, the image of an ocean behind two statuesque figures wrapping arms around a bundle of expensive looking adults imprinted on her briefly. They all looked vaguely like Allison.
“What the fuck.” Allison sat up abruptly. “This couldn’t have gotten on my fucking feed. There’s no way in hell.”
Renee slowly sat up and stayed quiet as Allison stared down at her phone. A minute of tense, hollow silence let them simmer as they waited for the reaction to settle.
“Fuck.” Allison says again, without much heat and tossed the phone to the cushion next to her half-heartedly. Renee slid an arm around her. “I mean, fuck. I finally, honestly just don’t want to know and then they somehow weasel their shit onto my shit.”
Renee presses her cheek into Allison’s shoulder, wishing she could redesign an algorithm for her.
“They’re not everywhere.” Renee reminds her, because popularity and visibility signaled worth to Allison. She paused to give Allison the space to talk, but Renee knew the only thing left was for her to say she didn’t care and that having to repeat those words made her feel more out of control and angrier than her family could anymore. “Have you got any new kitchen things to show me?”
Allison picked up her phone and finished off her coffee before leaning back and prompting Renee to relax with her.
“So, viridian.” She says conversationally.
Dan came home in the middle of Renee’s insistent gushing at Allison’s new additions to her favorite Pinterest boards while Allison consider whether to delete them.
“Honey, I’m hoooommmme.” Dan sang.
“Laid.” Allison comments.
“Oh, honeys I mean.” Dan came directly over to grin down at them. Renee craned her head up to return her smile and assure herself of Dan’s absolutely sparkling face, her grin turning her cheeks into cheery apples. Definitely quality time with Matt.
“Welcome home darling.” Renee says with just the slightest twang.
“Laid.” Allison repeats. Dan ruffles her hair, pushing her cheek farther into Renee.
“I’m making hats for Butterfly before the semester starts.” Dan nods knowingly, Renee has complained about the club’s downfalls to her before.
“Do you need help? Looks like you have a lot more yarn to go.” Then, determinedly “I can enlist the Foxes.”
Renee laughs. “Who do you think knows how to crochet?”
“You can teach them.” Dan says like it would be easy, with a glint in her eye.
“The monsters, knitting.” Allison says with a sneer.
“Neil asked us not to call them that anymore.” Dan reminds her.
“That wasn’t asking. That was a feral cat forgetting who fed it. It’s not just them anyway, the freshmen don’t even like Renee.”
They didn’t. The new goalie, Marcus, had convinced the rest of them she was judging them all from behind the cross on her necklace. She thought her demeanor rubbed him the wrong way, maybe like it did Nicky at first before she got a chance to chat with him about her faith. It bothered her like a thorn in her side. Marcus seemed set on not giving her a chance to resolve whatever it was, effectively isolating himself from all the Fox goalies that way.
“Allison.” Dan says, her cheer reduced.
Allison was tense next to her, hiding under a look of disdain.
“What I really need is some company. Maybe you can sit next to me and help unravel the yarn? Show me cute pictures?” Renee asks Dan, and feels Allison relax. Her old need not to look bad rubbed a little raw from the picture earlier, that’s all.
“How about some lunch.” Dan suggests, easily swinging over to the kitchen.
For all the ways Renee could still be drowning in her past, she figured the claws her memories still had around her sexuality still counted as doing alright.
Andrew told her she had to get herself the fuck together.
He was the first person she had come out to after Stephanie. And with Stephanie she had resorted to hastily writing the words out on the back of the nearest thing in reach- an envelope- during the middle of an already uncomfortable and hopelessly belated safe sex talk. Renee had figured if she was going to sit through it like sex was anything other than tainted she might as well go over the right things. Then she twitched for an hour after Steph had hugged her and held her and took her to church to celebrate, rescheduling the talk so she could do research.
She wanted to tell him after he came out to her. She knew he would appreciate the trade. But then she hadn’t been sure if he’d make a joke she’d take too personally, or if she could handle having someone laugh in her face about something that still tormented her, or if he’d let it slip in the middle of one of his endless streams of words. She had planned to wait the medication out, then that time came in the middle of the whirlwind that was last year. At that time she was considering just getting it over with and coming out to the team, solve two birds with one stone and make herself the newest bombshell. She couldn’t. After championships she managed to inform him casually, the “lesbian” so practiced it was almost nonchalant. Andrew just nodded and didn’t ask for anything more and she was grateful.
Then she tripped up. They had been lounging on the lawn next to the Stevenson Athletic Center after a sparring session. The girl’s volleyball team had just exited in a gaggle, lifting water bottles, stretching long legs, throwing smiles and arms around before descending on the outdoor net a ways in front of the pair. Renee didn’t feel bad about sneaking glances anymore, but the bending and the diving and the bouncing and the playful way they smacked each other on the ass after a good play had started. Renee’s body was suddenly heavy and still, her eyes flitting, hungry creatures.
She remembered herself with a wave of shame and turned to Andrew to cover it up. They had maybe been talking about dictators. His face was blank as ever, which made the vague amusement dancing in his eyes seem like two flares of fire. She tried to speak. His brow ticked up, just slightly. Her eyebrows began to twitch, then the hinge of her jaw where it had locked up, and then she couldn’t really feel her face anymore. Caught. Trapped.
It wasn’t like anything Nicky had gone through. She was certain of that. It used to be that when she tried to follow the clogged up parts of her heart back to its source, the reason for the lingering, ever-present discomfort she could only get snapshots. The rest of her past -those burden free days before her Dad was gone, the terror and violence and blood that stained her, that she decided to cling to, and the slow unclenching of her fists as she accepted it, learned to give something else to the world- she had studied. Tenderized just enough to find a type of peace in them. Flipped into flashcards that she could recount calmly. This was different.
Renee has tired and complicated thoughts about her sexuality and tired, complicated desires that she can’t say she’s scared of anymore. Not scared, just too tired from excavating the memories from stubborn flecks of leftover emotion in the light of day to pull out the last knot holding it all together. Tired of realizing that she could have had something sooner that having it now almost isn’t enough, is almost too much.
So she kept it to herself until that turned into saving it for herself. She was good at taking glances, stealing back pockets of wonder rolled in joy tucked next to a heart that almost felt light. The comforter covered in dozens of nude women made up in clean lines, freely contained in her bedroom back home. The really gay overalls, done up and down in pins. The gayer hat; cowboy and orange and pink. Most precious of all, her hair. The pastels just within view when she shook her head, raked her fingers in habit. Being seen for it though. Recognized. Giving herself away to be judged, at best. No.
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