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Carolines father had always told her, you’re too good for any boy, and maybe she’d kind of believed him. She always just let men approach her. If they seemed like the kind of man a woman like her would date, would be seen with, she’d accept his attention, let him take her on dates, let him tell her he loved her, let herself say it back to him. She’d let them press her down into the mattress, let them press into her. She didn’t mind the feeling. She liked penetration. She had a few toys that her girlfriends had shown her where to buy, pink and gelled and ribbed and buzzing and long, thick. She liked those. If when her boyfriend would be thrusting into her, she’d be thinking of the way she must look, long lines of her body contouring into the poses of the woman she paid careful attention to in porn, memorizing the way they’d arch and moan, she figured it was just because she loved her boyfriend so much she wanted to look her best for him. Do her best for him. She never left a sexual encounter feeling wrong, or bad, but she didn’t leave it sweaty and disarranged like she’d seen in those same videos. It was because they were actors, playing it up for the camera, and this was real life. She was more composed than all that.
She’d gotten her love of language from her nannies. There’d been a stream of Spanish floating around her, and when she’d catch the wiggling fins of a phrase and present it to her nanny, she’d beam and tell Caroline what a smart young woman she was. She loved the feeling. She knew she couldn’t pick up an accent for the life of her, that in all the languages she’d dipped her toes into, her tongue had been clumsy and thick, but she couldn’t let that stop her. When she’d cried that she couldnt roll her r’s properly, her nanny had held her close, brushed the tears from her face and told her it only mattered that she did her best. That she didnt let anything stop her from speaking, from trying her best to be understood, to understand others in turn. She’d taken that to heart, and for the most part people would only smile at the pretty young white girl speaking an earnest attempt at their language.
She’d gotten the obsession with her own blondeness from her nannies too, in a sense. They would stroke her hair and tell her how beautiful the golden gleam of the curls were. When her hair started darkening with age, and her father stopped hiring women to look after her, she’d dyed it back to that childhood colour to feel close to that little girl. She straightened it, though. In the one surviving picture she had of her mother, her face half obscured, the woman's hair was thick with a barely tamed blonde riot of curls, a strand half caught in the lipstick coating her sad, strained smile. Caroline didn't want to look like that picture. It made her feel bad every time she let herself look at it, which was almost never, and every time she let herself remember that it existed, which was more often than that. Her hair was nowhere near thick enough to pull off that volume, anyways.
Sometimes she wished her mother had just died. Or killed herself. Then at least the tragedy surrounding them would feel more storybook. More special. But no.
Sometimes, rude customers would insinuate things about how Max filled out her uniform, how Caroline didn’t. It didn’t bother her. She liked the way Max filled out her uniform, too.
Her instructor in university had been an older woman, but on the younger side for a professor. She had thick dark waves streaked with gray, and a soft, lilting accent that Caroline savoured all praise from. She was already inclined to what others referred to as academic overachievement, and what she called just doing what students do, but she knew that this particular instructor, this particular class, was one that she consciously attempted to achieve in. Over-achieve. Anything to be the one the teacher would direct her gaze to in approval.
She knew right away that Max was a kinder person than she pretended to be. For starters, she was bad at pretending anyway. And anyways, she had always had a freaky knack for being a good judge of character. For the most part, anyways.
She didn’t mind being stick-thin and near-curveless. She liked the way her girlfriends gazes would linger on her when they talked bodies, flicking their eyes from her toes to her tip, gaze assessing and envious. She liked that her body had barely changed from the little girl she’d been, or had changed so gradually she felt like she’d hardly changed at all. She felt connected to herself. She felt shameful pleasure in the way she could eat whatever she wanted and not worry, the way many women seemed to have to. She liked the way her girlfriends would go “giiirrl, what I wouldn’t do to have your body.” You can have it, she’d think, some buried thing shivering inside her.
It also allowed her to just- be with her dad, when he’d take her to dinner. Be in the moment. Buzz with happiness at the pride in his eyes when he’d watch her happily devour her sushi, watch her speak Japanese with the waiters. She loved the times she’d feel the blanket of his love wrap tight round her shoulders. She reveled in his attention, though she rarely had his time.
When she found out what he’d done, past the blank chaos, the whirlwind of the day, their assets and home and lives being seized, she’d been furious. Furious that he hadn’t let her know what he was doing. If she couldn’t have stopped him, she could have at least made sure he’d do it right. She had the head for numbers and business and he knew it. Why hadn’t he trusted her with this?
Oleg doesn’t bother her. She’d met men exactly like how he pretended to be, men who were worse. Men who’d wanted to hurt her, to have her. She noticed all of the ways he didn’t follow through with what his mouth was saying, always stayed a respectful distance from her and Max. He didn’t put more effort into leering at them than he needed to to make his point. She wouldn’t walk home alone with him, probably, but that was more on principle than out of genuine fear.
Max was… from the moment she’d met her she’d wanted to know her.
That first night, sneaking into Max’s bed, getting the knife pulled on her, she’d told Max she couldn’t sleep on the lumpy couch and she just needed a bed beneath her. It’d been true. But it had also felt like a lie, the insane, sleepless urge to go to Max, to stare at her dark curls splayed out across her ratty pillow and make sure she was real, that Caroline wasn’t dreaming. She felt a pull to Max always, that she didn’t quite understand, and didn’t quite try to. They were friends now. Caroline would make sure that stayed true.
“She’s my partner,” she would always say as she introduced people to Max. She clarified if they got the wrong idea, but she kept saying it for the times people would just silently accept the information, filing it away in their heads. She didn’t know why. She didn't think about why. She just kept doing it.
When Max had confronted her about it, exasperated in that way she loved to play up, Caroline had just shrugged, and undercut that shrug with a beam. “Aren’t we partners?” She’d ask, and Max would grumble and drop the subject.