@fuckingstripe
Kate’s tried, but there’s no budging Molly: she’ll come out of her room when she’s good and ready. It used to be that Zephyr’s visits brought her bounding out, all smiles, looking for a present, a laugh, a rumbling, “Hey, kid,” from the closest thing she’s ever had to a second mum--or a da, Kate supposes--but sixteen is a hard age. Not so easy to put off a sixteen-year-old with white lies and generalities about where Zephyr goes and what she does, about what she means to Kate, who she is to their little family of two. Not easy to explain why sometimes they’re three--wonderfully, happily three--but just as often, not.
Just the two of them on the sofa. Kate brings their cups of tea round. Sitting with her, she looks again--can’t help but look--at the fresh scar, a confronting pink, crossing almost the whole of Zephyr’s face in a slash across her aquiline nose. She makes a little sound of sympathetic pain, of frustration and tenderness, their mugs clinking onto coasters on the low table before she can scoot forward on the cushions and reach for her, taking her chin.
“Shouldnae ask where you got it, then,” she says. “No, I don’t want to know. C’mere.” She cups her face in both hands, looking deeply at her. Still Zephyr, fitting just right between her palms. Still all the usual questions--where have you been, what have you done, who were you with? Did you see someone else, touch someone else, while you were out there? Did someone else make you smile like me, and laugh? Did you miss me at all? And all the answers she’s afraid of, too. No, I don’t want to know. You could fill an ocean with the murk of all the things that go unsaid between them two.
She leans in and puts a kiss on the scar, right where it makes a jagged path over the bridge of Zephyr’s nose. “Poor lamb,” she says softly. She kisses her brow. “I’ve missed you. You don’t have any more, do you? That I can’t see?” It makes her gut clench to think of it. She needs to take inventory of these wounds, start pouring tenderness on them now.