Ash had forgotten, until the week of the procedure rolled around, that she ought to have updated her care plan; and then the clinic sent out the confirmation emails to both her and Darlene.
The realisation falls to the pit of her stomach like a rock. She gnaws on one of her fingernails, contemplates just texting Dar, but — no, she can’t, can she. Phones her instead, cringing.
“Hi,” she says, twisting a fitful fistful of her hoodie. “I dunno if you saw — I’m so sorry, Dar, I should have found someone else, I’ll find someone else—”
“Breathe,” Darlene tells her calmingly, and Ash wants to throw something at the wall. “It’s fine, Ash. If you want someone else there — and they can actually commit to it, at less than a week’s notice — then of course. But we were friends before, and we’re friends now.”
Pause.
“Unless you don’t want to be friends now,” Dar said, tone still carefully pleasant, and Ash’s finger starts to bleed under her gnawing.
Dar broke up with her, she wants to say. How dare she put that on Ash.
But Ash has had one of Ash’s stupid fucking failures to adult, hasn’t she, and Dar is being gracious, and she’s helping Ash without a qualm or hesitation because she’s a good person, so Ash can’t really be petulant about it, can she.
“Of course I want to be friends,” Ash says, because there is no circumstance that any other words are ever going to exit Ash’s mouth, trodden down and rendered a fawning doormat whimper by her censorious internal proofreaders, even if they weren’t true. “I’m sorry I didn’t—”
“Ash,” Dar says, soothing voice like a weighted blanket. Ash jerks and feels her heart bleed at the instant comfort she takes from it.
“I’m very grateful for you accommodating my fuckup,” she says, sharp like a mouthful of glass slivers. “You shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t have put either of us in this position. I’ll see you Friday.”
“Ash—”
Ash hangs up, grinds her fists into her cheeks, and curses at length.
It hadn’t seemed awful, before they broke up. The other driver was clearly at fault in a fender bender that knocked her head a little, so insurance covered the surgery; her lower jaw was already cyberware, so that was a simple like-for-like replacement. The real problem was that the impact had knocked loose one of the anchors cemented into natural skull around her TMJ, so that also needed replacement. They could do all the work in one go, overnight observation and then discharge; but to make sure the new anchor set properly, her lower jaw would be immobilised in software for a few days, until she could be checked over and given the all-clear. No solids; meal shakes and fluids via a straw.
And, of course, no talking.
What trusted person was going to be continuously on hand during that period to make sure she was okay, and call if she showed complications? Her girlfriend, of course.
And then Dar had started the terrible, sorrowful conversation with her; the one that went You lie to me constantly, Ash. I understand that it’s from a place of self-loathing, that you don’t mean it to be — well, lying; it’s just what you do. But if you’re never honest about what you want or need or feel....
And Ash had flailed for things to say to counter it, because after all, it was true.
You could— she’d started hopefully, leaping back to the earlier talks that had accidentally, indirectly precipitated the whole sad and sorry thing. There were things Ash wanted, if she could just manage to ask Dar for them.
No, Ash, Dar had said sternly, as close to angry with her as Dar got. You don’t get to say, just beat it out of me. Kink isn’t a shortcut to honesty; honesty is how you get to do kink, and Ash had quailed and repented and apologised, and kept compulsively apologising as the ground crumbled from under her feet.
Ash doesn’t really remember getting out of the clinic. She knows Dar woke her when they got back, so she must have fallen asleep in the car, still half-dazed from the anaesthesia and pain relief. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror; unopenable mouth, one side of her face swollen like a bad bee sting, with dressings taped over the seam of flesh and synthetics.
The drugs are ebbing; there’s the start of a deep, sharp pain, and a hot throb wrapped over it. Ash lets herself whimper softly, feeling sweaty and grainy-eyed and miserable. No shower allowed for 24 hours.
When she emerges, Dar has a travel cup filled with filtered water and ice cubes, straw ready to be fed between her lips. There’s a pad and a pen on the table, and also a number of self-contained pushbuttons, round flat things maybe an inch across, like wireless buttons for doorbells or Bluetooth novelties. Ash reaches for the pen.
what are those
“Oh,” Dar says, “I thought they might help,” and turns one over and over, button side down and back up, for her to look at. Each of the smooth plastic backs has a recessed screw, presumably to change a tiny button battery; on the top, on the thin trim around the pushable part, each has a word moulded into the plastic. Hungry. Thirsty. Tired.
Ash looks at them, and feels her head fill with a pressure that has nothing to do with the after-effects of surgery. She picks the pen back up, point pressing hard into the paper.
like for dogs
Dar looks at the words. Her hands twitch, as though her first impulse was to reach out; well controlled. She doesn’t look up from the paper to Ash’s face; she just sighs instead, and reaches for the buttons, one hand cupped under the edge of the table, to sweep them all off it and get rid of them.
“They weren’t meant to upset you, Ash,” she says quietly, plastic clattering into her palm, already starting to turn away.
Ash gets as far into what’s wrong with pen and paper as what before the fact she’s ekeing the words out too slowly and behind Dar’s turned back amply illustrates it. Feeling too hot and furious and clenched, she lunges after Dar, yanks on her sleeve, frowns into her face, yanks again, jerks her head at the table, nods at it pointedly for Dar to put them back down.
“Careful,” Dar mutters, but slowly does what Ash wants.
Ash peers at them again, closer, fists balled. Reaches out to poke one with a suspicious finger, eliciting a tinny, Asian-accented, cheap-hardware-mangled, “Hungry!” and enumerates the set again, pushing them over to one side as she notes what each is.
Hungry.
Thirsty.
Tired.
Ouch!
Crying.
Want.
Out.
An inarticulate suspicion puts its fingers around her throat and squeezes lightly, just under her jaw, making her shift her tongue in her swollen, metallic-tasting mouth. Glaring, she reaches for the paper.
why these she writes, and where's yes/no and shoves it at Dar, who looks at her levelly.
“Do you need anything right now, Ash?” she says, and Ash shakes her head angrily, points to the pad in Dar’s hand, makes a get on with it gesture.
Dar, slowly enough to be making a point, rearranges the buttons, lining them up in front of Ash, and points to them. “What do you need right now, Ash?” she says, slow and deliberate and sorrowful, and Ash flushes, excruciatingly seen, known, and dealt with. She glares at Dar, and at the buttons.
With as much petty spite as she can manage, she pokes Thirsty and stands with her arms folded as it forces Dar to wait on her; quietly fetch and hand her the travel cup. Ash carefully feeds the straw into her pursed lips and sips cold water.
Infuriatingly, it makes her feel better.
The first day goes okay, apart from…that. She’s tired. Sleeps for a lot of it.
The second day, she gets the first of her 10-minute video-and-text-chat checkup slots. Dar hovers quietly, just off-camera, in case any questions turn out best dealt with by someone who can actually talk. “Still very swollen,” Dr. Larson notes. “We saw the same thing after your last procedure, didn’t we? So it’s probably not a problem, but the best thing to do is keep an eye on it — and ideally, not touch your jaw until the inflammation goes down.”
None of this is news, though the uncertain duration stings afresh, right now.
The meal shakes are — well, they’re meal shakes, grainy and slop-textured. Exactly the wrong cold viscosity to register as palatable, taste like artificially flavoured chalk.
This is the worst day, Ash knows from experience, for pain. The clinic’s drugs metabolised out of her system, the inferior safe-for-home-use substances and dosages only taking the edge off, and the bulk of the healing still ahead. It feels like a spike in her cheek, pulsing like it’s being endlessly driven with a hammer.
Ouch! she makes the button say, loathing its cheery little badly-quantised diction, and Dar looks instantly up at the clock to check whether she can have more meds yet. Not quite, but she shouldn’t have them on an empty stomach, so Dar stands, stretches, says, “I’ll make up a shake.”
The prospect of more chalky sludge revolts her, bringing angry tears to her eyes.
Hungry, she pokes in furious self-pity, and then hurls a cushion at Dar when she nods and starts to say something. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry, until Dar’s expression sags in understanding.
“You don’t want the shake,” she says, and Ash throws herself back on the couch and kicks her feet furiously on one of the throw cushions, rhythmically clenching her fist around the little plastic puck. Hungry. Hungry. Hungry.
“Be careful,” Dar says, something like angrily, suddenly looming over her and boxing her head in with carefully firm hands, so Ash pummels her stupid muscled shoulders with her paltry fists until Dar wraps both her wrists up in a single strong palm. “You are not making yourself feel better by throwing a tantrum, Ash,” Dar says warningly. “You can’t have more pain meds until you have a shake. I know you don’t want it, but—”
Ash flails. The tantrum might not make her feel better, but throwing herself against Dar’s implacable strength, smashing herself to foam like a wave on a rock, feels — something. Something much more angrily satisfying than bad.
“Ash,” Dar scolds, shoulders flexed to hold her still. Ash’s hands scrabble in their current futile range of motion, clawing at the cushions, rattling the scattered handful of buttons—
Crying, a genial voice crackles matter-of-factly under her accidental grab, and Dar recoils instantly, face a picture of shock, self-recrimination settling on it like snowfall.
Ash shakes her head too vehemently, and flinches at the rush of pain from it. Misses her grab for Dar’s shirt as she slithers away.
They look at each other, both a little out of breath. Ash makes a theatrical grabby motion for her again, telegraphing a plea, and Dar’s mouth crumples a little. She takes a small, deliberate step back.
“I’ll make you a shake,” she says, not wholly steadily, and Ash scrabbles around for the buttons until she can press Ouch! at Dar’s retreating back, and then resentfully hates Dar’s flinch.
She’s allowed a first shower, as long as she keeps her face dry, and god she wants to feel clean, more than she wants to lay down her tired, painful head, and much more than she wants to sip more meal slurry or watch Dar hover at a protectively vigilant remove.
She leans heavily against the shower stall, and Dar frowns at her. “Are you sure—”
Ash cuts her off: Out. She watches Dar cycle through wide eyes, a visible effort to swallow down concern, a tired smile.
“Sorry,” Dar says, and softly closes the bathroom door behind her.
Ash immediately wants her back in the room. She wants to lean on her. She wants to be a weary princess who just has to stand, raise her arms and step out of her pants when she’s told, someone else competently in charge. She wants Dar to look after her, so badly, but it nauseates her for Dar not to want to want to.
She manages a tired and perfunctory scrub, collarbones down. Tries not to think how unattractively matted her hair must be.
She’s not expecting Dar to have waited exactly outside the bathroom, hands clasped together behind her like they need to be kept away from trouble. “Okay?” Dar says, and Ash fumbles through the pocket of her bathrobe, squints at the handful of plastic trinkets to inform her: Tired. Dar’s expression goes soft in a familiar way which acutely hurts. “I’ll wake you up in time for your next meds,” she says, lightly touching Ash’s shoulder, and Ash just nods.
It’s habit, she supposes, that has them both step into Ash’s bedroom. Habit, and care, that makes Dar start to peel the robe off her shoulders before realising that there’s nothing at all under it. Ash had been too tired to bother with anything else, that’s all; she belatedly clutches the robe together as Dar takes a step back, both their faces red.
“I didn’t mean—” Dar starts, and Ash nods; she knows. She looks at the handful of plastic in her shaky palm.
Crying, her finger says, and shakes her head desperately at Dar’s blanch, stuttering her finger on the button. CryCryCryCrying. Ouch!
“I’ll—” Dar says, choked, already facing the door, already reaching for it.
Want, Ash tells Dar’s retreating back, and when Dar’s escaped onto the landing, adds, Crying.
“Your face is looking better,” Dar says over the breakfast table next morning, while Ash is unenthusiastically looking at her shake, and for a moment Ash wonders meanly how she can even know that when she won’t look at Ash.
She sighs heavily, shoves the handful of buttons around a little on the table with her finger.
Very deliberately poises her finger over one, and depresses it.
Want, it says.
“Ash—”
Ash is already resorting to the pad. JUST TELLING YOU. She interrupts Dar by shaking it at her emphatically; gives her a second or two to make sure she’s read it, then shakes it at her again.
Dar sucks in a long breath, like doing it hurts. Exhales in a controlled way. Sucks in another one. Nods, face pained.
Ash picks up one of her hands and squeezes it for a moment, then retreats to her side of the table. Sips meal shake. Makes a terrible face. Sips more. Watches Dar breathe her amazing strength back together.
God.
She slaps her hand down again: Want.
And that’s how the day goes; when she sees Dar through the kitchen doorway, watering the three little plants on the windowsill, face serious: Want. When she watches Dar napping on her couch, and the other woman’s eyes open sleepily in the early afternoon sun: Want. When Ash, too, naps, and the first thing she does on waking is know that Dar is in the house with her, whether or not she’ll hear the tinny little speaker: Want. In between sips of a meal shake. When she’s finished it, and Dar carefully fills a little stubby plastic measuring syringe from the bottle of painkiller solution, and Ash tilts her head back and lets Dar slide it between her lips, into her good cheek, and squeeze a little at a time into the back of her mouth for her to swallow — something she could, probably should, be doing for herself; in time with every loud beat of her heart — Want. Want. Want.
“Ash,” Dar says, putting the syringe down with a shaking hand, steps away, half-collapses into a kitchen chair. “I can’t. I can’t keep guessing what you need because you never tell me. I can’t keep getting it wrong—” and Ash drops to her knees by her, urgently shakes Dar’s leg, shakes her own head, pushes the pad into her hands, JUST TELLING YOU still shouting off the page. She curls Dar’s hands around the edges of the page, cradled in her own, and then when Dar’s breathing sounds less like she’s going to cry, pulls one of their joined hands away to press against her good cheek for a moment.
Dar keeps hers there for lingering seconds when Ash releases it, trailing her knuckles gently across Ash’s cheek while Ash uses her newly freed fingers to repeat: Want.
The second checkup video appointment goes pretty well. Dr. Larson does the remote vitals reading, asks Ash simple questions not too taxing to type out answers to; asks her to turn her head and lean into the camera, try to get the best light on her face; says “I’ll get Reception to book you in for an in-person follow-up in about a week,” and sends the unlock command to her TMJ.
Moving her mouth feels incredibly sore. The first thing she does, after the call, is go to the kitchen and drink water out of a glass, swishing the first couple of mouthfuls around her teeth and spitting them into the sink.
“I’m going to brush my teeth,” she croaks at Dar, and then, gripped by sudden fear, grabs a tentative handful of her shirt. “You won’t leave before I’m finished?” she says, voice rusty and nakedly vulnerable.
“I won’t,” Dar says, and she’s still in the kitchen when Ash comes back, although she’s all packed up and ready to go. She unfolds herself from the chair, and brings Ash into a hug.
“Don’t take this wrong,” she says, wry and low, “but I need a day by myself in my own house. And I think you do, too.”
Ash breathes the scent of her, and reaches for honesty as though it can be as simple. “I want to disagree with you,” she mumbles, “but yeah. Probably,” and feels Dar take a deep breath against her.
Her own breath catches as Dar puts a hand on Ash’s wrist, slides it down to wrap around her fingers; slides their joined hands into the pocket of Ash’s sweatpants, the pocket that Dar spent yesterday shying from her every move toward. All the other buttons are in the pocket on the other side and only one here, so Ash didn’t have to fumble her words to find it.
Dar wraps Ash’s hand around it, and her own around Ash’s, and together, breathing together, they squeeze out a single truth.
