#this was so barbara and melissa of them | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cdyssey · 1 year

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Lies

Summary: When Barbara has a flat tire at her church, Melissa goes to help her. Of course she does. (Post-2x13).

CW: Religious Guilt, Alcohol, Emotional Infidelity/Infidelity

AO3 Link

—

Gerald Howard is the one who calls her.

It’s unscheduled, for sure, but not entirely unexpected.

He’s out-of-town on a work trip, and as such, he only calls Melissa when he’s gone, away, out-of-pocket, and unavailable.

When he has a slight variation of the same, old favor to ask of her.

Take care of her for me, will you?

(Like she doesn’t already do so anyway.)

“‘Sup, Ger?” Melissa says around the toothpick clenched between her teeth, propping her phone against her ear with her shoulder. She’s just polished off the rest of her leftover steak from the other night, and now she’s in the process of making herself an excessivelyboozy bushwacker with every intention of getting buzzed.

Between the demands of the fundraiser and everyone and their cousins either fighting or eye-fucking, it’s been a long damn week at Abbott Elementary.

Melissa had mostly stayed out of it, except to help two grown men arbitrate custody rights over a cat and give Janine a little unsolicited dating advice that may have accidentally just boiled down to women are hot… but still, all of the collected tension gradually sucked the air from the hallways and kept her on edge—that fine line between general wariness and hypervigilance that she tends to straddle on a daily basis.

So Mama undoubtedly needs a drink… or two… to help ease her into the weekend. She’d been planning on stripping down to her undergarments and curling up in her bed to watch basketball, sipping on her bushwacker through a bright green bendy straw…

When Gerald calls, though—sometime a little after six—she gets a gut feeling that these best laid plans might just have to wait until later.

“Nothing much, Mel,” he returns, and she can hear the tired smile in his voice, his gentle fondness for her, his familiar care. “Still in Jersey for a couple of days. This job’s taking a little longer than expected…”

Gerald’s a welder and he sometimes gets sent out-of-state for the odd contract or two. Decent money. Effed up hours. It’s been happening with more and more frequency lately too, driving his wife nearly up the wall and through it.

“He’s never home anymore,” she’d only recently complained. They’d been sitting on the sagging couch in the break room together, waiting for the morning news to come on. No one else had arrived yet, and so their shoulders just touched, the soft lines of their thighs.

Side-by-side.

Parallel to each other.

Always.

And Barbara had idly played with her ornate wedding ring, twisting and twisting it around the base of her finger, while Melissa had simply watched, mesmerized by the way that the diamonds glittered in the harsh light.

“And even when he is home… even when we’re in the same room—" She had gone on before abruptly stopping, biting her plump lower lip, visibly conscious that she was about to reveal too much.

Even to Melissa.

Perhaps especially to her.

For all that the two of them shared between and with one another, somewhere along the way of their nearly thirty year friendship, they had articulated an implicit rule to never quite discuss the intimacies of their love lives anymore.

That particular conversation nearly always devolved into one of their rare and exceedingly bitter fights.

(You don’t know him like I do, they’ve both said to each other before.)

(Why do you care so much?)

“Mm,” Barbara had only murmured, shaking her perfectly coiffed head, “forgive me, Melissa—you shouldn’t have to be subjected to my marital woes before the bell has even rung…”

In that moment, as Barbara expertly smoothed her troubled brow over with a sad and beatific smile, Melissa hadn’t dared transgressed their personal golden rule of noninterference. Letting the other wallow, no matter how much it hurt to watch them suffer. Moreover, she knew from experience that there was nothing to say to that anyway—nothing, at least, that the older woman was ready to actually hear.

But in the absence of words—in the mutual understanding that they were not allowed to confront each other directly in that way—she reached over and laced Barbara’s slender fingers with her own, creating yet another contact point between them.

Shoulders.

Thighs.

Hands.

Barbara had permitted the intimate touch; she even closed her darkly framed eyes and leaned into it.

It was an innocuous indulgence that both of them could live with come the next morning.

“Oh, yeah, Jersey,” Melissa replies neutrally, finally taking the toothpick out of her mouth and lightly tossing it into the nearby trash can. “Barb said somethin’ about that.”

Granted, she can’t help but get one jab in, perhaps as recompense for all the times that she’s had to listen to Barbara endlessly complain about the circular problem, day-in and day-out: “She swears y’spend more time in a hotel than at home these days.”

She has no particular remorse for saying so; she knows this isn't exactly news to him.

“Occupational hazard,” Gerald mumbles sheepishly, his only reasonable defense, his go-to excuse, that same somethingshe’s pretty sure that both Howards tell themselves at night, incapable of admitting to anything else.

“I know,” Melissa frowns sympathetically because even still, despite her frustrations, she gets it.

She really does.

It took her and Joe years upon miserable years to ever 'fess up to the truth of what time had done to them and their once loving marriage—and even then, they could only do it when the barrel of their loaded histories were pressed against each other’s already bleeding skin.

In the end, she couldn’t stand for him to even touch her.

They fought so much—every day and all the goddamn time. If it wasn’t about their abysmal finances, then it was about his booze problem, the way he drowned a particularly bad fire in whiskey. And if it was supposedly about his jealousy that men and women alike looked at her whenever they went out, then it was really about sexand their increasing lack of it thereof.

In the end, too selfish to ever go long without a good fuck, he cheated on her with Nina Santa Cruz, one of their mutual friends.

And that was that.

The trigger was pulled; there was nothing left to do except bury their vows in a shared grave and call it a goddamn waste.

They had loved each other.

Really.

But that’d been a long time ago, and they had been different people then.

(They had just been kids.)

“But, uh, listen… that’s kinda what I’m calling about anyway,” Gerald continues, his tone now hesitant, appropriately chastised. “Just got off the phone with Barbara and she said that she has a flat tire at our church. Bible Club tonight, y’know… I called my brother, but he won’t be able to help her out for another hour or so. Do you mind swinging by there and taking a look?”

She doesn’t even hesitate.

“’Course,” she nods vigorously—only dimly aware that Gerald can’t see her—already moving, already raring to go. Barbara is in trouble. Barbara needs her. She unceremoniously shoves her blender glass with the unfinished bushwacker in the fridge, throws on a leather jacket and scarf, and unhooks her keys from their place on the wall. In the mad whirl and cacophonous rush, she almost misses his next response.

“Thank God—I knew you’d say yes,” he sighs in audible relief. “It’s funny. Barb seemed kind of reluctant to call you...”

“Huh?” The question comes out a little more forcefully than she had intended. Hurt even. (Melissa hates to admit it—how easily hurt that she gets.) She’s at the door that leads from her kitchen to the garage, her fingers tensed around the brass handle as she digests those thoroughly unexpected words. “What d’you mean by that?”

Gerald must hear the defensiveness in her tone because he scrambles to come up with a placating answer.

“Oh, well, you know our Barb,” he chuckles nervously, and her stomach strangely twists at the choice phrasing. Not his Barb. Theirs. As though they have an equal claim to knowing her intimately: her husband and her... best friend. “So prideful… and she told me that you were busy doing something with Gary tonight.”

The strange assertion stops her short.

Not only is it explicitly untrue—(she hasn’t been out with Gary the Vending Machine Guy in ages)—but Barbara specifically knows that it’s untrue. In fact, just before they’d walked to their cars this afternoon, Melissa had told her what her plans were for the evening.

Nothing and jack squat.

Wanna come over for dinner?

It’d both been her way of making sure that Barbara wasn’t alone in her achingly empty house for yet another night while Gerald was gone… and also a subtle opportunity for her to check in with her after everything that had gone down with the fundraiser and Ava. Melissa has had a long week just being at the margins of everything, but Barbara, in the center of it and the thick, has had a hard one.

There’s a crucial difference in the fact, but there has been precious little time for her to pull Barbara off to the side and ask her how she really feels about any of it.

She got a sense, from how Ava and Barbara had been laughing together in the gym earlier today at the assembly, that they had at least patched things up; however, Melissa won’t be completely satisfied until she hears it from her friend’s mouth that she’s okay.

Barbara had politely refused her offer, had told her that she was going to Bible Club, but that she'd see her on Monday, girlfriend. And nothing had seemed amiss except for a vague tiredness in her eyes and perhaps a certain tightness in her lipstick coated smile that could have been just a trick of the light.

Clearly, though, something is up.

“Seriously, Mel, if you’re busy, don’t worry about it,” Gerald adds as she mulls this over in complicated silence. “Samuel will be able to get to her once he gets off of work, and there are probably still folks at the church who can keep her company…”

“No,” Melissa says hastily, realizing that he’s trying to give her a generous out. “I’ve got it. Gary, uh, went home early.”

She’s not entirely sure why she’s playing into Barbara’s inexplicable lie—perhaps to spare her best friend the ignominy of being caught, perhaps because she wants to be the sole one to discover the truth, perhaps because she’s starting to get an inkling that whatever is going on is bigger than she’d originally assumed, and only she seems to realize this.

To recognize the warning signs.

Gerald is… well... absent.

“Oh, good,” comes a grateful reply, a thoroughly oblivious one. “Thank you again, Melissa. What would we ever do without you?”

“Excellent question,” she laughs heavily, shrugging a hand across the back of her neck.

The gesture does not warm her eyes.

—

Some twenty-five minutes later, when Melissa pulls into the driveway of the Baptist church that’s a little less than ten miles away from Barbara’s house, she’s greeted with an utterly strange and estranging sight: a nearly empty parking lot, a vast and unlit building, and a dark silhouette sitting on the stone steps leading up to the white double doors—simply shivering in a long, silvery coat with a fur collar…

As she eases into the empty spot to the right of the familiar black sedan that’s parked directly in front of the stairs, her headlights rove over and mercilessly illuminate that tall and lonely figure.

Barbara Howard, ashen with the cold, squints and visors her eyes against the twin beams, her mouth rounded in a perfect ‘o’ of surprise.

She’s caught.

Apprehended.

And, just by the looks of her, clearly undone.

Melissa barely remembers to brake her car and turn the ignition off before she’s stumbling out of her door and into the biting air. Out of the corner of her eye, she can already tell that Barbara’s front right tire is indeed flat, but she’ll worry about that later. Knows how to put a spare on with her eyes closed.

There are bigger problems to deal with, far worse demons to bravely confront.

“What the hell are you doin’ out here, Barb?” She calls out, her voice nearly swept away by the wind. Folding her arms over her chest, she marches forward and forward still until she’s at the foot of the weathered staircase, and Barbara’s wide-eyed gaze is consuming her. Her painted lips are chapped, her cheeks noticeably hollow, and unmistakable tear tracks have vertically frozen on the sharply hewn planes of her face. “You’re freezin’ your ass off.”

“Language, Melissa,” Barbara scolds reflexively, though the sound is vacant, lacking any real conviction. “We’re near the house of the Lord…”

“Sorry.” She resists the urge to roll her eyes at the familiar sanctimony, recognizing that now is hardly the time. “You’re freezin’ your tush off. Is that better?”

But she doesn’t receive a response, Barbara now determinedly looking somewhere over Melissa’s shoulder, plainly trying not to cry, so loathe to be vulnerable in front of anyone, eternally convinced that no one wants her emotional honesty, that they’ve come to expect the performance and the impeccable mask.

Melissa gets it.

She really does.

Nine times out of ten, she feels the exact same way.

“Okay, okay, no more wisecrackin’ out of me,” she says, her voice softening, and she takes the last couple of steps between herself and Barbara at a jog. When she’s even with the other woman, she lowers herself down gently until they’re sitting as they always do—as they have historically done—brushing limbs. Shoulders. Hips. Thighs. It doesn’t escape Melissa’s notice that Barbara’s forgotten her gloves again, and her fingers are trembling where they're clasped in a neat temple next to her stomach.

Without hesitating, she peels off her own green scarf and methodically winds it around Barbara’s chilled hands like she’s bandaging a critical wound.

“So level with me here,” she goes on as she finishes the job, loosely tucking the ends away. Barbara only stares down at her now swaddled appendages, her eyes glazed over, her posture as unimpeachable as ever, shoulders squared, spine ramrod straight, like a perfect, porcelain doll. “You’re sitting outside in the cold in front of a completely dark church even though it’s barely seven o’clock. And your tire’s flat, but ya lie to your husband about why you don’t want me to come ‘n bail you out.”

Barbara inhales sharply at this last part—at being called out for her fib—snapping out of her reverie as though stricken.

“Melissa, I—” She rasps, audibly horrified.

“—I’m not mad,” Melissa adds quickly, curling her hand around the other woman’s slender wrist and squeezing. It’s true enough. Any anger that she might have felt quickly dissipated upon seeing the kindergarten teacher on the steps, so sad and tired. Irrefutably broken. She’s never had it in her to kick a helpless creature when it’s down. “I just wanna understand. This isn’t like you…”

In the ensuing silence that follows this choice assertion, long and painfully loaded, the harsh wind eddies around them both. Melissa instinctively wants to encircle Barbara with her arms and shield her from it.

But she takes one look at her face, at the divot in her black brow, at the ruins of her ancient eyes just beneath, and immediately understands that the kindergarten teacher is barely feeling the cold right now, that whatever is hurting her springs from some deep well within her soul, spewing forth like a polluted spillage, gurgling and gushing.

Simply oozing.

An infection has settled, and it has made Barbara Howard absolutely sick.

“Isn’t it, though?” Comes a quiet reply, faint and almost indistinguishable, but wrought with unmistakable bitterness. “I am all hypocrisy, Melissa… I’ve tried so hard to be good, to follow all of God’s carefully articulated edicts, and still fall short of His glory…”

“Is this about Ava?” Melissa guesses—perhaps a little too hastily. Even though she hasn’t heard all the details yet, she’s at least understood that Barbara’s fight with the principal had been about Ava playing dirty with the fundraiser and the older woman not liking it. “If it is, I’ll talk to her.”

And say what—she doesn’t exactly know.

She doesn’t particularly see anything wrong with what Ava did in the first place.

Hell, in her shoes, she would have done the same herself.

She has done the same herself. What Ava calls her charisma, the Schemmentis just know as basic survivalism—whatever it takes to be the last shmuck standing.

But she’s desperate to solve the problem, to propose a solution that will make the woman next her stop looking so haunted. Barbara shakes her head, though, with more vehemence than she’s displayed through the entire conversation.

“No,” she says firmly, cutting her dark eyes at Melissa. “This isn’t about Ava… she… she actually made a lot of sense this week, perhaps being the first person to ever directly tell me that many of my moral boundaries come from a position of privilege—the luxury of never having had to learn better.”

It’s a charged sentence, one that the second-grade teacher doesn’t have to dwell on very long for it to click. Barbara Howard is undoubtedly a sheltered woman in many respects, having never needed one goddamn reason to play in the mud as she had once so indelicately put it, cutting Melissa to the quick. She’d been discounted by so many people in her life that it’d almost become background noise—the way that every Tom, Dick, and Harry had no trouble in presuming the worst of her. But never in a million years had she ever thought the same sort of dismissive rhetoric would ever come from Barbara, her closest friend in the entire world.

Barbara, who had always believed in her.

Barbara, who thought her capable.

Resourceful.

She supposes, though, the other teacher must have limited her definition of Melissa's resourcefulness to just having a guy who knows a guy, willfully ignoring that her affinities for scraping by and twisting arms and shaking people down are crucial extensions of this trait. Indeed, being resourceful to her just means doing whatever it takes to endure a life where she learned quickly enough that just about everyone has it in them to hold a knife.

Melissa is silent at this revelation—awed that Ava of all people had been the one to tease it out of Barbara and maybe even a little jealous that she hadn’t been able to do so herself.

That she hadn’t been the one to make her friend fully understand that there is no such thing as clear-cut morals in a world of monsters and men, especially not when the two are often one and the same.

“This is about me,” Barbara continues of her own accord, her voice breaking on that last syllable, that simple and so heavily freighted word. “And the fact that even though I am well aware of my own follies, of the sins that stain my immortal soul, I… cannot bring myself to fully repent, to refute Ava’s philosophies, to emphasize the straight and narrow way to my students…”

She pauses, glancing at Melissa through long lashes, tears shining in her eyes.

“To regret shaking down Sister Delisha Sloss for you, Melissa," she breathes, her voice low and constricted. “I was so happy to do that—if it allowed me to make things right with you, if it granted me your precious forgiveness—that it was easy to justify everything I had thought wrong about it in the first place…”

So they’re both thinking of that day, huh?

Of one of the most horrible fights that they have ever had.

Barbara doesn’t regret her apology, she’s saying.

It was sin, but even still—

She did it for Melissa—she cares for her that much—and the confirmation of this settles in her belly with a warmth and a gratitude that she would have never thought possible.

“Barb,” she intones gently, still gripping the other’s wrist, “there’s nothin’ to regret about any of that. Being good and being right sometimes aren’t the same thing in this world. Life's too complicated for that. Humans are, and God’s gotta understand that.”

He’s God, not some fundamentalist Christian.

Surely, He’s made it so that the fate of one’s soul isn’t determined by how well one mindlessly and dispassionately follows a set of written rules.

Surely, that is not all that worship boils down to in the end.

“I think you’re right,” Barbara readily replies, sniffing as surreptitiously as possible. “I think you and Ava both are for that matter—”

“—words I never thought I’d hear ya say for 500, Alex,” Melissa can’t resist the quip and receives a baleful glare in return.

Okay, she deserves that one.

“—but understanding that for myself? Internalizing such a crucial message? That’s even trickier when I’m surrounded by people who don’t get it either,” she finishes with an exhausted sigh, glancing over her shoulder at the church, magnificent and imposing even in the concentrated gloom of this starless night. Melissa follows her gaze to see that she’s specifically staring at the double doors, upon which a neon pink flyer has been taped to one of them.

She can’t make out the wording from this distance, but she doesn’t have to—Barbara explains in a horrifyingly numb voice.

“I’m being iced out,” she says, her eyes flat. “Bible Club was apparently canceled this evening, and the first I heard of it was when I pulled up and saw that notice on the door. I should have received a call, or even just a text from a fellow sister in Christ, but why would I?”

She laughs bitterly, and the unpleasant sound aches Melissa’s sternum—the clarity in it, the conviction.

“When Sister Sloss—yes, her"—she nods vigorously at whatever disgusted expression must be manifesting on Melissa's face—"saw us at the mall the other day, she designated me as not church-like, so naturally, the whole Bible Club—ha! perhaps even the entire congregation!—probably believes so as well now, and I’m being righteously punished for it, judged and clearly found wanting…"

Barbara smiles coldly, the gesture settling like iron on her lips.

"Perhaps the good Lord is in on the joke too if my flat tire is any indication of the karma that I’ve earned."

Melissa just stares at her, blinking.

“So wait—you mean t’tell me that the woman who’s been stealin’ from your church has the gall to call you not church-like?” She huffs indignantly, her breath forming a visible cloud in front of her face. (Goddamn, it’s freezing.) “And you believe her?!”

“Yes,” Barbara laughs again, this time sounding genuinely amused at Melissa’s outrage, this time almost sounding like herself again, and somehow, at the same time, still sounding so broken. (Maybe, though, this is just how the older woman always sounds, and she's just taken all the correct precautions to masterfully hide it.) “Utterly ridiculous, I know.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and I thought I had some image issues,” she shakes her head, unable to see the humor in Barbara Howard loathing herself as much as she clearly does. There is nothing funny about that, nothing acceptable, nothing even remotely light. “But you, hon, you take the cake, icing and all.”

She says this last part very gently, though, well-aware that Barbara’s conception of herself is a delicate subject, and indeed, even at this slight comment, the mirth quickly drains from the other’s eyes, leaving nothing behind but the unwanted dregs—that same sense of loss that she’d perceived in them earlier when she had first pulled up.

Barbara is as unbalanced as she has ever seen her, standing on a tightrope high above a dark, seething sea. Melissa wants nothing more than to grab her hand and lead her back to solid ground, wants to tell her that she can rest now.

It's over.

There’s no more need to so capably perform.

She's going to fall and break her neck; she's going to plummet, headfirst, into that violent and pitiless sea.

“Yes,” the older woman returns quietly, her shoulders sagging, even if just a little. “I’m starting to recognize that too…”

And a tear finally slips from the corner of one of her eyes, slinking down the crevasse of her angular cheek, collecting calmly, like a crystallized memento, on the vertex of her chin.

But Melissa, without so much as blinking, reaches over and gently thumbs it away, cupping the line of her beautiful jaw. She knows she should let go—painfully cognizant that this moment does not require such prolonged intimacy—but she doesn’t. She just holds Barbara’s face in the palm of her hand, in the gentle caress of her shivering fingertips.

“I’m sorry that I lied to Gerald,” Barbara croaks, leaning in to the touch, more tears starting to visibly well, falling in earnest now. “I didn’t want you to see me like this, the mess that I am.”

“Shh,” Melissa consoles her, continually swiping at her face. “I know. I know.”

“I don’t deserve you, Melissa Schemmenti.

“Don’t say that,” she protests fiercely, meaning it with everything in her, with every atom, every indivisible cell. “Love isn’t flippin’ conditional, Barbara.”

Goddamn, who taught you that?

How did you ever come to think such a horrible thing?

“You… love me?” Barbara asks, her voice almost aching with childlike wonder, and the simple question and the older woman’s rapt, awed expression nearly knocks the air from her lungs, and on the steps of this Baptist church, she’s suddenly staring at her best friend’s lips, which are only inches away from her own—the plum color of them, the beauty—and seriously thinking about committing sacrilege.

“Yeah, ‘course,” she breathes, her fingers still gracefully arched against that cool, smooth skin. “To know ya is to love you, Barbara Howard, all of you—even your messiness."

She loves every part of her.

Oh, God, how she does.

And she has tried so hard to ignore this crucial fact for years and years now—deeply aware that Barbara is a somewhat happily married woman—but knowing and feeling are two entirely separate entities, and they war with each other daily, unfailingly drawing blood when they clash.

Barbara visibly swallows at this, the peristaltic motion pronounced in the pillar of her throat, and Melissa’s heart throbs against the wall of her chest, damn near close to leaping out of her ribcage and killing her.

(Maybe even liberating her at the exact same time.)

Without being fully aware of what she’s doing, or perhaps being entirely aware, perhaps losing all the inhibitions that have kept her in line, Melissa leans forward, still holding the other woman's face—

—and Barbara, as though magnetized, eyes wide open with melancholy and longing and horror and holy delight, does so too—

—but as their foreheads just touch, the tips of their noses brushing, their hot breaths flooding over each other's skin, they both recoil backwards, like two binary stars who have remembered that their lot in life is to eternally orbit each other.

Spiraling around the same center of gravity for time immemorial but never, ever colliding.

Barbara pulls away violently, gasping for air, unloosing the scarf around her hands so she can massage her convulsing neck. She coughs and coughs—her chest heaving—and she coughs.

And Melissa, suddenly feeling sick at what she’d nearly made Barbara do, can only pinch the bridge of her nose against the nausea surging through her.

They’re literally on the steps of a temple, and they almost just desecrated it together.

They almost just kissed.

“Fuck,” she spits out, even though she's not supposed to be cursing because something holy happens here. Something decent. But she forgets herself. She'd almost just done a far worse thing. “Sorry, Barb, I—“

“No, no,” Barbara interrupts her, her voice impossibly hoarse. “I just… accidentally slipped, that’s all.”

She had done no such thing.

This is the crucial lie that they will both tell themselves, though, the story they will desperately cling to so as to keep everything the same between them come Monday morning.

They are just friends.

Barbara slipped.

Melissa loves her but not like that.

“Oh,” she happily plays along, relief flooding through her entire nervous system at this exceptionally good pretense, this readymade out. “You’re always such a klutz.”

She most certainly is not, but this is the role that Barbara will gracefully inhabit to make this charade work for the both of them.

“Guilty as charged,” she laughs, and Melissa does too, the sounds horrible and strained and just a little hysterical—and maybe a whole lot—as they mingle in the darkness of the night, the unrelenting coldness.

“C’mon, let’s get your flat changed before both of us freeze t'death,” she suggests, standing up somewhat laboriously, nearly toppling over, her joints all sore and stiff. She catches herself on the nearest railing. “I’ll follow ya home and make sure the spare doesn’t pop or anything.”

Melissa damn well knows that she should extend a hand and offer to help Barbara up too, but she thinks that could be dangerous.

What if Barbara accidentally slips again?

So she faces forward, towards their cars, and starts legging her way back to them. Always prepared for emergencies such as these, she’s got a jack in her car and a heavy duty flashlight. It won’t take her long to put the donut tire on at all…

“I’m so sorry, Melissa,” she only just hears the spoken words, whispered as they are to her retreating back, snatched up as they almost are by the brutal, unforgiving wind. “I love you too.”

Melissa pauses on the bottommost step, the heels of her boots teetering on the precipice and the vertiginous edge.

She knows if she looks behind her now, it will all be over. She will not freeze. She will not turn to stone. She will run to Barbara Howard, that married, married woman and tenderly cup the nape of her neck. She will kiss her senseless, spread her lips like they are divine, and she will enjoy every last second of their mutually entangled sin… she’s never exactly had a problem with being a cheat…

… but then, Melissa—just as Barbara must do every single day—suddenly hears Gerald Howard’s soft voice in her ears.

Take care of her for me, will you?

Our Barb.

What would we do without you?

And the horror of those words—the weight of that carefully placed trust—simply guts her. She unwittingly touches her stomach and half-expects for it to be covered in matted blood.

“Huh?” Her voice sounds like a nasty echo of itself. “What was that? I didn’t hear ya.”

(But she did, and despite what both of them would like to believe, there's no rewinding the tape, no unringing the bell, no resetting the sands in the hourglass, no taking back the words they have said and the things they have almost done and the secret something that exists between them, taking up space every time that they sit next to each other in the same damn room. They love each other; the fact is irrefutable. They love each other; they're running away from the fact even now, as though the freshly dug dirt won't be visible in the clear light of day.)

“Nothing,” comes an equally harried reply. “I just said that I’m right behind you…”

Sure, yes.

That’s exactly what Barbara must have said.

Melissa lets out a breath that she didn't realize she had been holding and takes that final step. The soles of her boots harshly scuff the dark pavement, the sound intolerable to her ears.

Life goes on anyway.

#work wives #barbara howard #melissa schemmenti #gerald howard #s: abbott elementary #abbott elementary #reginianwrites #oh i fit so much angst into this bad boy #IF YOU SAW THE ITALICS WERE BRIEFLY FUCKED UP AUHGHSHE #GDI #I FIXED THEM

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