Isa is blotting the wine stain when Ruth wakes up. Ruth has always been a light sleeper, and she gives a little mew as she stretches to wakefulness. She is near enough that her thigh brushes against Isa’s when she leans over.
‘We all fell asleep,’ she murmured into Isa’s ear.
‘Yeah.’ Isa keeps her eyes trained on the stain. A dark maroon splashed across the beige wool in a poor man’s version of a Rorschach test. If she looks hard enough maybe she could see something. A bird. A flower. A blossoming orchid, soft pink petals opening up, almost too gentle to be touched.
‘Did I spill that?’
‘No big deal.’
‘Let me help.’
Ruth takes the towel from her. Three red lines strike across her cheek, a lingering kiss from the table she’d snoozed on. The table must be at least a hundred years old. Isa could picture generations of young women seated around this, up late studying. Hair tumbling over smooth shoulders, wavy after a day pinned up. Quiet sighs as they slouched. Stomach pouches released from their stays, breasts loose and whispering against white nightgowns. They looked, perhaps, at each other. Noticed the way firelight caught the glisten on a bottom lip. The shadows of eyelashes stretching toward cheekbones. The warmth under each other’s skin.
‘Was I drooling?’ Ruth wipes at the corner of her mouth.
‘No.’ Isa looks away. ‘This won’t come out. Think there’s cleaning supplies downstairs?’
‘Dunno. Think we’ll get fined for a stain? This rug is probably eight hundred years old.’
Isa laughs instead of saying that the university hasn’t been around that long, which is what she would’ve said if it were daylight and she was trying too hard.
The top button of Ruth’s shirt has come undone and Isa blinks away from it. Her skin looks so smooth, so peach and so warm. Their classmates are still asleep, sprawled across the floor and sofas. Their cozy study haven turned into nothing but a sleepover. The last time Isa went to a sleepover she’d been thirteen, and she’d changed into her pajamas inside her sleeping bag and stayed underneath until the other girls were dressed and the lights switched off.
Ignoring the want felt like building a dam. Years and years of pouring cement, rising with the water level. The last defense for a city-on-the-river. If it broke, Isa would drown with everyone else. She’d read somewhere that drowning was the most excruciating way to die.
‘I’m going to look for some carpet spray,’ she says, getting up.
‘Oh, come on.’ Ruth tugs at her arm as if to pull her back down, but stands up instead. ‘It’s not that bad. We can take care of it in the morning.’
‘The longer we leave it, the tougher it’ll set.’
‘It’ll be an improvement, trust me.’
‘A wine stain on a rug that’s been here since 1903?’
The tinkle of Ruth’s laugh reaches high to the ceiling. The chandeliers are old, too, previously used to hold candles. The preservation society hadn’t let them be removed during renovation and prohibited the installation of garish fluorescents. The compromise resulted in dim spotlights zigzagged along the ceiling every few feet. Half of them are off now. A deep, hot thing gathers in Isa’s belly.
Ruth checks her phone. ‘It’s after one. Reinforcements?’ She gestures to the empty snack bags strewn across open textbooks and laptops. ‘Or are you going to bed?’
The way her mouth forms around the word ‘bed.’ The breathy ‘b.’ The ‘d’ lingers on her tongue a split second longer than it needs to.
‘I need to clean this up,’ Isa says. ‘Then I’m going to bed.’
‘Fine. I’ll go wet this again.’
In the moments Ruth is gone running warm water on the towel, Isa kneels down again and digs her nails into her knees until it stings. She releases, checking for blood, though the color would blend in with the wine anyway.
‘You’re so particular.’ Ruth sweeps in next to her. The stripes from the table are fading off her cheek. ‘Cleaning everything all the time. Were you ever messy growing up?’
Isa shrugs. Instead of blotting, Ruth rubs at the stain. This will make it worse, she wants to tell her. You’re just spreading it more. It won’t come out that way.
‘Let me,’ she says when she can’t help herself anymore.
She reaches for the towel, but she gets Ruth.
Ruth, Ruth, Ruth is nothing but warmth and pressure. Their mouths don’t fit together at first until Ruth takes Isa’s jaw in her hand and tilts it precisely how she wants. Her arms are full of Ruth, her fingers slipping into the dimples at the small of her back.
Every single nerve in Isa’s body is alight and straining toward Ruth. Reaching and pulling and grasping and next thing she knows, Ruth is on the floor and Isa has her knees on either side of her hips and there is a sound, not too different from when Ruth woke up earlier, that lands in Isa’s mouth. Someone’s arm collides with the table.
The stain.
Isa scrambles up, cold snapping through her body just as quickly as the heat had. Ruth’s shoulder is in the wine, but when Isa checks, nothing has smeared.
‘It’s already dry.’ Ruth is annoyed. She sits up, buttons her shirt again.
‘I’m going to bed. Maintenance will probably send it for cleaning.’ Isa collects her things without looking. She may have to return someone else’s laptop tomorrow.
Ruth turns away, silent. Another Isa would have returned to her. Peppered kisses up the back of her neck, nipped at her ear and said, Please let’s try that again, please.
She leaves.
Camille Clarke is a Midwestern writer currently living in the South. Her work has appeared in Jellyfish Review, Milk Candy Review, Moonpark Review, and other publications. Her special talents are racking up fines at the library and forgetting she made tea an hour ago. Find Camille at www.camilleclarke.com and @_camillessi
