The first time Becky stays over after the factory shift, the air is electric.
Jane feels it all over. Like someone is pouring ice cold water, from the tip of her head, down her spine and belly and making her legs shake with a long–forgotten excitement. Something about Becky just makes her feel bare.
Becky, herself, strips down just as the door closes, as if there’s nothing to be ashamed of.
(God, God, good God, as Jane looks down at Becky’s body, built of the most beautiful shapes, slim and elegant, milky skin dotted with freckles and small incisions and bruises, she thinks that there’s really nothing to be ashamed of. It’s like God himself chiseled her from marble with utmost care.)
And God’s own hand–crafted daughter is sitting at her table — just in her chemise, cropped down just to her knees, and bust bodice, toying with the hem of the shitty tablecloth. It’s stained with tea rings, and dirty from food crumbs, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
All her attention is focused on Jane, as she pours both of them tea into painfully typical teacups, with simple violet and leaves finishing, and finally, finally turning around to face the eyes burning holes in her back.
Becky’s eyes are too intense for Jane to just keep standing there. Bright and fiery, underneath light eyebrows, above red cheeks — they’re the blue that fires in the factory burn when the ovens are hot enough, like she wants to burn Jane alive.
The sudden surge of hotness that passes through Jane with a shiver is so damningly powerful she can’t help but look lower, lower—
Jane takes a step forward, and it’s all it takes for Becky to suddenly spring up from her seat and pull Jane into a kiss more heated than any kiss she had before.
Jane’s chest shakes and aches, air escaping, everything suddenly becoming more.
It’s too cold for her to just stay in their undergarments, so Jane dares to put her hands on the bare skin peeking out on her stomach, and she swears to God Becky melts, like hot fudge. In retaliation, she wraps her arms around the back of Jane’s neck, hand diving into the short hairs at the nape, and groans into her mouth.
Becky smells like the factory and sweat and the stink of the dirty water the factory produces, but all be damned, because when Jane gets to grip so low on her back, to the point where it’s almost hilarious, any bad smell is whiskered away.
One of them pulls away, she’s not sure who, after a moment of heated kissing — and Jane breathes out. This is more than she ever could get from anyone, knees buckling more, hands slippery where they try to catch on fabric, breathing ragged and shaky.
Becky’s mouth presses against her sweaty neck.
“You’re so beautiful, you know that?” Becky murmurs, right into the column of Jane’s throat. The vibrations make Jane shiver.
“You are.” She replies, raspier.
Becky looks at her, like she won’t respond just out of courtesy, and grabs her hand — a silent question when she cocks her head towards the bedroom.
It’s too cold to stay out of bed.
“Do you still love Tom?”
Becky’s question lilts in the air. Her hair rises up and down along with Jane’s shoulder as she breathes. She can see the slightly oily crown of it.
She does. At least that what she thinks is appropriate to do — to miss her husband, away at war, fighting for their country in glory and fame. And she’s here, working at the sidelines, making bullets for rifles that kill men, that will kill her husband one day. Whether from his own hands, or someone else’s.
That’s the right thing to do. She promised to devote herself to him the day he kneeled down in the garden behind her parents’ house and asked her to marry him, and she agreed, despite the uneasiness squirming in her stomach.
Her body is screaming at her to just roll over and shut Becky up with a kiss.
That's what she does.
(Her mind, miraculously, shuts up too, as soon as their lips make contact. And, at Becky’s enthusiastic kissing back.)
She pulls away — too early, her mind screams, go back, — and with a disappointed noise from Becky, rolls out from underneath the covers.
“I’ll bring the tea.”
Becky rolls her eyes with a sharp smile.
(“I’m going to go.” Tom says, one evening, when Jane’s leaning over the stove, flipping the meat in a rusty pot. “Sign up with the army.”
There’s a painful sting somewhere near her heart, her gut, as she straightens her back, hearing it crack from being in one position for so long.
“I knew you’d do this.”
She turns around, grabbing a cloth to dry her hands off, and Tom has this awful, truly awful smirking–like expression on his face, the gap in his hind teeth where one was knocked out showing. His eyes glimmer with danger.
It’s the smirk that simultaneously makes Jane terribly angry and turns her heart into tiny pieces, like stew, breaking up when it’s cooked for too long. It’s the smirk she fell in love with and that made her fall out of love — at least partially.
Today, the angry part of her wins.
“You know—” She starts. Her voice already turns sour, raspy, and a part of Tom’s smirk melts away. She’s not sure if it’s all a hoax to just calm her down, or if he’s seriously considering her feelings.
“That I don’t have to.” He finishes. For her. Gets up out of his seat, hearing it crack under his weight, and starts shuffling towards her as Jane’s nose scrunches up. “Sweetheart—”
“Don’t sweetheart me.”
The wet cloth slaps against the counter.
That night in their marriage bed — he made it custom for them, taking Jane’s exact measurements just days before their wedding so she would be comfortable in it, and she remembers giggling as the measuring tape tickled her bare skin — he’s so damningly gentle when he kisses her, and she cries more than the day of her wedding and the wedding night together.
She doesn’t even care that much.
“My dearest.” He whispers, and his fingers feel like he’d just come inside from a snowstorm outside, and is trying to warm them up. Ice cold. Ten ice picks on her stomach.)
The second and the third time Becky is over after the shift, they don’t even exchange a word to know she’s coming over.
Lips on lips, rough, from the hours bent over steaming machinery, and it starts once they walk out of the factory, continues in the corners where the street lamps don’t reach, with hands grasping beneath coats. It’s disgusting, really, how Jane isn’t able to keep her hands off Becky, but so sweet when Becky can’t do either.
When the apartment door slams closed, any societal expectation gets thrown out of the window.
“You’re so,” Jane gasps, breath hitching as Becky’s leg kicks upwards, a storm of freckles passing by her, “so, fuckin’ beautiful.”
Becky doesn’t have enough air to reply.
“You’re so beautiful,” Becky says, gentle, like it’s something easy to push past her throat.
Jane stays quiet.
Becky’s arms are covered in bruises, fresh and still–hurting when Becky leans on them on her bed, and Jane swears to murder Stanley, followed by frantic pleas from Becky to please not kill her husband, she doesn’t want Jane to go to jail.
Jane kisses her, tipping Becky over so she makes a soft noise as her back hits the mattress, and keeps quiet about how they could go to jail if their secret affair ever got out.
The seventh time their schedules don’t end with the second shift. All they have time for is Becky sending her an apologetic glance as they pass each other in the entrance hallway — Jane half–asleep after the shift, Becky as fresh as
Jane cries hysterically under her dinner table until she manages to drag herself to bed.
This is alright. It’s just a slight change of what she expected.
Things get domestic before Jane realizes it.
Becky is cutting the singular fish they’d gotten at the trip to the market downtown earlier, she’s sipping on a tea while flipping through the morning newspaper.
It’s domestic.
She could get used to this. She could live like this — with Becky as her fucked–up–version of a wife, maybe even Jane herself acting like the husband, or something along those lines. Stay in this shitty apartment, just to clutch onto the pretending of a life they would never lead otherwise. She could—
“Fuck Tom.” Jane quips, almost like a hiccup, and if her throat closed up she would have written it off as such. Painful and short but so true that it hangs in the small room like the lingering smell of a perfume.
But it doesn’t. To the horror of both of them, she goes on. “I want to— I want to be with you, Becky. Not him.”
Becky still doesn’t turn around, to add to her fear. She doesn’t even move — she stops cutting the fish, hand holding the knife stilling, like someone froze her suddenly.
“Rebecca.”
Becky looks at her — finally, — yet there’s something in her eyes that makes Jane’s stomach drop even more, and clutch onto her newspaper.
She drops the knife with a clatter onto the counter, and shuffles over to her, slowly kneeling. (She shouldn’t. It should be Jane.)
“Jane.” Her hands are too dainty, too soft and warm for the work they do. For the damage they’d caused. For the things they’ve touched. “We can’t.”
Her head shakes, chest aching with long–forgotten rage. Just kill him, God, just kill him.
“I’ll leave Thomas.” Jane declares.
Becky’s eyes widen. Just for a moment, but it brings all the good memories, and Jane has that stupid childish hope that Becky will be fooled by her falsely strong voice and believe her.
Then her eyes float downwards, to where Jane’s dress ends. The dirtied, scrawny end.
“We both know you won’t.”
She doesn’t know. Maybe she does, and is pretending to herself she’s stupid and foolish and doesn’t know, but God, her heart feels like it’s being torn out of her chest — and if it was just Becky, she’d let her, because Becky is gentle — but it’s Tom, too, and she can’t trust two people with something so delicate.
Jane slides down from the chair and drops to her knees.
She presses her face into Becky’s skirt. It smells like the factory, like oil and like blood and mud from outside, and it’s all permeated with the musky smell of Becky she’s grown so accustomed to she’s not sure if she can be away from, ever again.
“Please.”
She’s bent over like a repenting sinner, spine up, stomach hidden, face in the ground.
“Jane—”
“Please, please,” spit falls out of her mouth as she prays, to anyone who will listen. (To Becky.) “we can work it out.”
There are fingers on her jawline.
Becky raises her face so she can look at her, and it’s like God brings her to his image.
“I love you.” Her own face screws, painfully, her eyes and the skin around it reddened. “I love you, and that’s why we can’t be together.”
(They end up in bed, together, that night, — of course they do — and fall asleep between one exhausted pant and the other, sweaty arms and deeply moving stomachs, between stockings and corsets and various pieces of fabric.
Jane barely has the energy and memory to remember about the candle on the side table and put it out.)
It's been three months, two weeks, since the beginning of their illicit affair, and Becky wakes up first.
It’s already light and bustling outside, Becky can see the street coming to life through the yellowed curtains. Jane lives in an apartment nearby the center, so it’s loud from early morning, even before the sun rises.
Speaking of Jane.
Speaking of Jane, and her angel–like face, eyebrows finally not drawn downwards, resting across a bumpy forehead, blonde hair strewn across her favorite pillow — one hand tucked under her chin, the other almost touching Becky’s shoulder with fingertips.
“Be’?” She mumbles out, voice rough from disuse, but her stirring is calmed when Becky threads her fingers through her hair.
“Just getting up.” Becky nuzzles her hair, and smiles at the disgruntled noise Jane makes as she burrows deeper into the covers.
She’s halfway done with her dress skirt when the doorbell rings.
The mailman — a young, scrapy kid, with round glasses perched up on too–long nose on a too–long face, framed by too–long hair, an ill–fitting mailman cap on his head — looks at her, quite surprised, as his eyebrows
“No Mrs Houston today?”
Becky, very pointedly and half–curiously, looks in his eyes for a few moments before shaking her head.
“She’s fallen a bit sick. I’m taking care of her. Any mail?” She makes a nod towards the bag over his shoulder, and he scrambles, searching through it in haste until he pulls out a small, yellow envelope and passes it to her with a shy smile.
The mailman salutes her on his way off, and she smiles at his joyful jump from the bottom steps of the porch. She’s so bone–deep tired, even with her sleep being better than ever, warm body pressed against another warm body, that she can’t imagine making any more movement than going back inside and laying back down.
The envelope in her hands is a bit dirty and yellowed, like it’s been through some adventures on its way. Especially with the amount of various postage stamps — she could probably put the entire map of the US with them.
Mrs. Jane Houston
90 Westside Street
Hatchetfield, MI 49437
Doesn’t seem too suspicious. Handwriting is pretty crappy, so it’s not a military letter with condolences. Might be just an old friend of Jane’s, with the amount of travel she told Becky about having gone through in her early twenties.
Shouldn’t be a secret bomb from the Germans, or anything like that, Becky jokes to herself as she walks inside, kicking the door closed, carefully opening the envelope with the mail knife Jane keeps on the table in the hallway.
She unfolds the letter, folded multiple times, and digs into the chicken scratch on brown–ish paper.
“April 2nd, 1918
Dearest Jane, light of my days,
They’re discharging me. I’m going home. Back to you. Cannot say much, they’re censoring the letters anyways, but I’ll be on my way when this letter arrives. I cannot wait to kiss your sweet lips, and finally feel more of you than the piece of fabric you gave me.
Always yours, devoted for life
Thomas H.”
Becky’s—
It’s all factory noise.
Becky isn’t quite there. It’s like she’s sucked into one of the bigger machines at the factory, and every mechanism is crushing and mauling her, between the well–oiled metal parts, steam and hot air coming from every side.
Tom. No, Thomas.
Tom.
Just thinking about him makes her stomach revolt, and the letter falls to the floor with a deafeningly soft sound — hitting the carpeted entryway as she stumbles against the wall, once again destroying everything she worked so hard for once she touches it.
Jane.
The factory noise gets louder, and louder, until all she can think about is buzzing like a swarm of flies inside her brain,
She feels—
“Becky?”
A warm presence over hers, both hands on her bare arms, completely focused on her, and instead of being comforting, it ends up making her stomach churn in disgust.
Factory noise. Jane’s voice gets lost in it all, like it does on shifts too. It doesn’t carry through with the rasp it has when she yells a few times.
“Rebecca?”