#laura leigh turner meet me in the pit

[sprnklersplashes]

Ask and ye shall receive, the fic in which Karen decks a Republican in the face. Gretchen x Karen. Trigger warning for homophobic language.

There are a lot of really, really great things about being able to drive, Gretchen has come to realise. For one, she’s found it’s a really effective way to kick her anxiety in the ass. Slow down, focus on the road, and the little grey cloud starts to drift away. Two, it means she no longer has to walk to school, or get the bus, or even worse, get the car with Regina. It does mean she can no longer get rides with Janis, but they can carpool sometimes and it’s worth it for number three… She can drive Karen places. To school, home from school, out to the mall, home from the mall.

Or like now, when she’s picking her up from her yoga class. While it was initially something Karen’s mom signed her up for to keep her from getting bored and restless in the house, she’s taken a greater liking to it than either she or Gretchen could have anticipated. Especially with the array of outfits she now has, courtesy of a month ago when Gretchen let Karen drag her all around the sportswear store. Her Instagram is now filled with photos of her in her various colour coordinated outfits, completing the pose with her yoga mat and sticker-covered water bottle. Many of those photos were taken by Gretchen herself, both fulfilling her duty as girlfriend and making use of the photography skills she’s picked up over time. Except this time she’s doing it without a certain someone snipping at her every five seconds, so it’s even better.

Sitting on the hood of her car, she opens up the email about the photography course her dad had sent her. ‘Seems like something you’d like’ he had offered. ‘You know, you’re always taking pictures one that phone of yours and they turn out nice. Maybe you could do even better with a real camera’. Despite her protests over who would pay for a camera, she hasn’t stopped being tempted by it since her father proposed it. The more she read, the better it sounded, spending three weeks learning how to take the best shots, play with editing, practice with models (meaning drama students from the same art college, but hey, maybe she’d run into Damian there). As the last days of school approach, so does the deadline and she finds herself running out of reasons to say no. Something she’s used to, but in this context, it’s for once not a bad thing.

“Gretch!” When she looks up, she’s greeted to the sight of her girlfriend, sunshine hair and sunshine smile, scurrying across the parking lot to meet her. Her hair is held off her face in a high ponytail, the perfect style for kissing her neck later, but for now it’s perfect for yoga, and videos on her Instagram of the post-yoga ice cream she and Gretchen always get (she earns it, after all). She bounds up to Gretchen and throws her arms around her, giggling into the crook of her neck. “I missed you.”

“You shouldn’t miss me,” she replies. “You should be busy having fun.”

“I can do both,” Karen grins. “So are we getting ice cream?”

“Of course we are,” Gretchen replies.

“Oh wait, I need to kiss you first!” Gretchen barely has any time to laugh before Karen pulls her against her and presses a sweet kiss to her lips, tasting like strawberry lipgloss and mint-tinged water. A thrill runs down her spine and it banishes any bad thoughts that could lurk in her mind.

“Excuse me?” a voice says from behind them. They pull apart for Gretchen to see a girl around their age, maybe younger, a yoga mat also thrown over her shoulder, raising an eyebrow at the two of them, eyes narrowed. There’s something in her gaze, the contempt in the curl of her mouth that makes Gretchen instinctively want to pull away from Karen.

“Oh hi Molly!” Karen says brightly. “Gretchen, this is Molly, she does yoga with me. Molly this is Gretchen, my girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?” Molly echoes flatly, her eyes flitting over Gretchen. While the sun doesn’t disappear overhead, but the parking lot gets colder. “You’re…. a lesbian?”

“Oh, I’m pansexual,” she corrects, her voice still sunny as ever. “See?” She taps the pan flag sticker on her bottle. “Gretchen’s a lesbian though. So’s our friend Janis.”

“Okay,” Molly says sharply. Karen’s smile dips. Gretchen wraps her own shaking hand around Karen’s. Molly flicks her ponytail off her shoulder and marches towards them, making Gretchen’s heart pound. Luckily for her, she maintains a little distance between them. “Look Karen, I don’t mind your lifestyle. In fact, I respect it. A lot. But for God’s sake….”

Gretchen tries not to visibly cringe, but the words cause a hurt in her chest that’s not unlike her usual anxiety, but there’s a cold undercurrent to it, the words sickeningly familiar and picking at her skin. She tries to swallow pas the hard lump in her throat.

“What’s wrong?” Karen asks, beautifully oblivious.

“Karen,” Molly scoffs. At that moment, Gretchen bites the inside of her cheek, her chest flushing and while it’s not the first time she’s gotten angry, she’s still unused to it. She hasn’t gotten into the habit of letting it out in the moment rather than her usual “put it in a bottle, push it down and let it fester” tactic. But she doesn’t think she can push it down this time around. “Karen… there are kids here.”

“Yeah I know!” she goes on, glancing at the kid’s ballet class two doors down from her yoga studio. “They’re cute aren’t they?”

“Yes. And they don’t need to be exposed to that kind of lifestyle.”

An invisible weight slams into Gretchen’s stomach, harder than any punch. She sinks down onto the hood of the car on cold legs. Her whole body is cold, her limbs feeling as though they’ve been detached from one another and float next to each other. When she tears begin to form in her eyes, she can’t even muster up the effort to blink them away. She’s not like Cady, who looks for the best in people, or Janis, who even when she gets hurt, follows it up with a middle finger. Where they make impacts, Gretchen just gets impacted.

Karen’s mouth falls open when she takes a look at her, and her gentle, warm fingers wipe her cheeks, kissing the wet tracks. Then her jaw sets, her shoulders tense underneath her tank top and she whips around to face the other girl, so quickly Gretchen is treated to a ponytail in the face.

“You know what, Molly?” Karen says, striding over to her. “You are really not nice.”

Molly whirls around and nearly falls to the ground, not of her own accord, but because Karen just punched her in the face. She shakes out her hand, wincing and checking for marks, meanwhile Molly looks at her with her mouth hanging open and her eyes wide and blazing. She stands there, frozen in that tableau, the only sound being the tiny, appalled squeaks escaping her mouth as she searches for the right words. Or any words.

“Don’t be mean,” Karen hisses. If Gretchen wasn’t watching the scene for herself, she wouldn’t even think that was Karen speaking. “Especially not to Gretchen.”

Yet when she turns around, all she sees is Karen, pushing a loose strand of hair away from her face and grinning at her.

“So are we going for ice cream now?” she asks, as if there wasn’t a dazed and shell-shocked girl holding her cheek, an angry purple bruise already beginning to form there.

“Sure,” Gretchen says, her eyes still lingering on Molly. Dazed, she follows Karen into the car and hops into the driver’s seat while Karen toys with the radio and starts humming and dancing along with the pop song that blasts out of the speakers. Her dancing is only slightly off beat, her humming occasionally punctuated with a nonsensical noise. As they pull out of the parking lot, Molly gets to her feet, still staring after the car in utter shock, fury evident in her tight fists. Her bag swings around just in time for Gretchen to see the red Trump sticker glaring out at them and she grimaces. “Oh, gross.”

“So gross,” Karen agrees as she applies lipgloss. “She’s really gross.”

“You took care of her,” she adds, smirking. Karen hums casually and shrugs, screwing the lid of her lipgloss back on tightly.

“She had it coming,” she says. “I don’t like mean people. Especially when they’re mean to you.” With pink cheeks, Gretchen lifts Karen’s hand in her free one and kisses it.

“You’re the best,” she says, meaning every word. “Though I really want to know where you learned to punch like that.”

“Janis taught me!” she says proudly and Gretchen has to hold herself back from groaning. There’s another conversation to be had later. “By the way, I might start taking up boxing. There’s this cool adults class my mom found.” Shaking her head, Gretchen smiles and heads off down the road in the direction of the ice cream parlour, trying to imagine Karen in kickboxing.

Well, if nothing else, it’s more ice cream dates for them.