It Should Have Been Obvious

Katie McHugh

The woman is all smiles as she approaches me in this tacky, dime-a-dozen Dublin pub that is named after some poet or another. She startles me with her garbled words and pearl-white teeth.  

She’s pretty, is my immediate thought. And half a second later: She’s drunk.  

“I told them I thought you were beautiful,” she says, gesturing to the couple at the end of the bar. They wave politely before glancing away. “I was all like, I’m gonna talk to her. I’mgonnadoit. And they were like, You really shouldn’t do that.”  

“And yet, here you are. Are those your friends?” 

She takes a swig of Guinness. “Not five minutes ago. I’m traveling alone.”  

“Oh,” I say, swirling my own glass of chardonnay. “I guess that makes two of us.” 

Actually, I’m not alone. Not in Ireland, at least. My father, uncle, and grandmother are collapsing into food comas only four blocks away, at a B&B on the edge of St. Stephen’s Green, bellies full of shepherd's pie and mashed potatoes and copious servings of beef stew. I myself had ordered cod, and as I’d handed my menu to the waiter, I understood that while we might’ve been one family, we were on two entirely separate summer vacations.  

“You?” the woman says. “You’re alone? But you’re so beautiful. I mean, you’re so stunning. You’re the most stunning person here!” 

I would argue with her, but there isn’t much competition. Around us, the pub prepares to close. The bartender seals the lips of liquor bottles with saran wrap. The members of the live Irish band case their fiddles and stow their bagpipes away. Only our fellow American drunkards, oblivious to the glaring social cues, remain—so I’m fairly confident no one notices my spit take when the woman declares: “We should make out.” 

“What?” I say, wiping the spittle from my chin. 

“I know, it’s crazy. My gay roommate back home tells me I’m straight. You’re the straightest person I know, she says. Straight as a ruler. And I have to believe her, right? Because she’s gay, and she’s telling me I’m straight.”  

“Right,” I say. 

“But I just feel this connection with you. This soul thing. And I think, what are the odds that we’re at this bar in Dublin together? And then I think, what does it matter if I’m straight? You’re stunning. And you’re alone. And I’m alone. And it just feels like the universe wants us to make out.” She downs the remnants of her Guinness. Her tongue flicks against the cloudy rim of the glass. 

“What about you?” she asks after she's finished. “Are you straight?” 

“I…” 

I don’t know, is what I mean to say, but then I realize, as one can only ever realize in the heat of the moment, in the terrifying midst of the thing, that it isn’t what I want to say. I am straight. Or rather, I have always been straight. My adult life has been a revolving door of heterosexual relationships, one after another, and I’ve never thought—have never even known it was a possibility—to experience something else. 

I study the woman once more. I like her smudged makeup. I like her red acrylic nails. I like how her hair falls in loose curls around her shoulders like so many ferns unfurling. And though I understand there should be something deeper—some soul thing, as she said before—it is the sheer womanness about her that piques my interest. That makes my stomach rupture and the wine on my breath taste sweeter, and stronger. But then again, this might be the deepest attraction of all. The attraction to womanhood, which, as we all know, is in so many ways the crux of the story.  

Her beauty multiplies under my stare, and then she trips. Maybe it’s on the uneven heel of her boot. Maybe it’s on nothing. The woman is bleary-eyed. She has a wet, pink mouth. She stumbles right into me, places her palms on my barstool, just barely grazing the sides of my thighs, and pins me with a look that I have used on so many men before her and would use on so many men after her—a look that tells me she knows exactly what she’s doing. 

“I’m bisexual,” I answer, and summon the weary bartender to top off my wine.   

—————————————————— 

In hindsight, it all seems so obvious. I have spent my entire life anticipating this moment. I have channeled it in every fit of girlish laughter, every stroke of my hand against my friends’ hair. Countless memories of sleepovers where we did not sleep, of girl-bodies caressing in the dark, where we confessed our sins and tried our best to make light of them, until suddenly, somewhere between a chuckle and a yawn, we faltered; and just like that, we were weeping uncontrollably, melting like ice sculptures in one another’s arms; sometimes we wept because we were young and hideous, other times because our parents told us, in actions as well as words, that they didn’t love us anymore; ultimately, we wept because we felt that we had been wronged by the world, because there was so much goodness inside of us and so much meanness everywhere else, and because we knew for certain that if we didn’t have each other—or worse, if there had been a boy in the room, his eyes ready to subsume our feelings into his fantasy—then we would’ve crumbled into nothing; for these reasons and more, we cried; we cried until we physically couldn’t anymore, until the silence within us became so eternal that it warded off the dark, and the pain of being girls seemed a bit easier to bear; then, once all that had passed, we giggled; we shook our heads and kicked our feet like the children we didn’t believe we were; we wiggled the grief right out of us, the giddiness, too; we wiggled ourselves exhausted, only faintly awake; and in those few dreamlike seconds before we drifted into sleep, our bed might’ve been the entire universe; we weren’t worried about the women we would someday become, those weary twenty-two-year-olds who might (or might not) look back and remember this sensation as the mausoleum of all hope and desire; no, we simply laid there and looked at each other, peering past the nighttime, peeling back curtains of shadow, looking down to our very souls. 

Even now, I can hear the pounding in my chest as it was back then. I can feel the terrible yearning, which could not be described as platonic or romantic or even sexual. In all honesty, I cannot find a word to do it justice. I can only tell you that this story, although lacking the language to declare itself, is never ending. Like Athena and Pallas, or Jane and Helen, or Virginia and Vita—when all else fails, there will continue to be girls in beds, touching and crying, laughing and looking, seeing and being seen. 

—————————————————— 

In Dublin I decide that kissing a woman is a lot like having a secret. Hushed tones, furtive glances, giggles. We know something the rest of the world doesn't. And we pass this secret back and forth, shaping it in the heat of our mouths, as we kiss in her hotel lobby, and in the elevator, and in the stairwell beneath the judgmental lens of security cameras. 

The woman has me pressed against the wall—my shirt half-off, silicone pasties stuck haphazardly to the wall beside us. She tastes like cigarettes I don’t remember smoking.  

I learned her name earlier in the evening, along with her age, which I was surprised to learn was pushing thirty, and her hometown: New York. In return, I told her I was twenty-three—she thought this was “cute”—and living on Long Island.  

“Maybe we can meet up sometime,” I’d said, trying for suave as we waited for our drinks at what I guessed was our fourth bar. 

“Maybe,” she answered. “But I’m pretty busy, you know?” 

With this, I began to recognize that we were teetering on the edge of something sacred and singular. An experience that, what with her gay roommate and inarguable straightness, she might never think about again, although I would think about it for the rest of my life.  

“Open up,” she tells me.  

My lips part obediently, the fleshy tissue of my mouth exposed as if I were at the doctor’s office, saying Ahhh. The woman smiles at me. She waggles her perfectly manicured fingers and runs the pointed tip of her nail along my teeth. She lingers for a moment, contemplating, and when I close my eyes, I can hear nothing but the scratch of her nail against the bone-white enamel. Then her finger is gone. Replaced by something wet and muscular, dragging along the roof of my mouth. Her tongue.  

“Do you like that?” the woman whispers. 

And before I can answer, Yes—Yes, I do—Yes, the door behind her claps open and a gaggle of men tumbles into the stairwell. I say men, but they dress and carry themselves as boys, with moth-eaten basketball shorts and slouched postures and the like. They are startled, I think, to have found us here. Their wide, glossy eyes resemble pearl onions in the fluorescent stairwell light. They should be able to guess what we’ve been up to. Our kiss-bitten lips. Bodies wrapped up in one another like tendrils of vine. But the boys gaze blankly at us, not comprehending. It isn’t until one of their gazes slips toward my navel that I sense the dawn of their understanding, cresting over the woman’s hands, which have wandered under my shirt and dived beneath my waistline.  

The boys’ jaws slacken. They pale as if struck by a fever. Then, one by one, they begin to smile.  

“Nice,” one of them mumbles.  

I wrap my arms around myself, concealing the pouch of my belly and nudging the woman’s hands away. Realization arrives a bit late for her, having to shovel its way through her drunken stupor, but it arrives all the same, and I am grateful when she tugs my shirt down from where it had gotten caught around my neck. She even smooths out the wrinkles.  

She spins toward the boys, chin lifting. “Need something?” 

“We were going to find something to eat,” one of the boys explains.  

“Pizza,” offers another, “We’ll just be on our way.” 

“Okay,” the woman says. “Then go.”  

But they continue to stand there, their Adam’s apples bobbing. I don’t think they have it in them to move. Leaving would contradict what they know to be true: that the world does not turn—and two women do not kiss—without the presence of men to witness it.  

In their defense, it isn’t a farfetched assumption. Plenty of women have made out for the sake of men’s entertainment—myself included. In almost every other scenario, I would have gladly obeyed. I would’ve performed like a circus animal, my sensuality on display, moaning against my girl friends’ lips until an onlooker leaned in and said: I think you might be a little too into this. And yet, at this moment, I am curled in on myself, backed into a corner and feeling nothing remotely close to turned on.  

The boys get the hint eventually. Or maybe they simply grow tired of waiting for a show that will never start. I’m not sure. All I know is that, for one reason or another, the promise of pizza is suddenly more tempting than the thought of two girls making out. They swagger past us, descending down the stairwell, and for a while, their voices continue to echo, their cravings for buffalo chicken and pepperoni interspersed with questions like: So do you think they’re gonna fuck?  

The woman sighs. She’s smaller now, more relaxed, and it occurs to me that, all this while, she has been protecting me. Even though I spent the entire night thus far trying to occupy the masculine role, twirling her across sticky bar floors, taking her by the wrist to guide her home. I didn’t even notice when our roles had reversed.  

“Come here,” I say. 

She drifts toward me, and I don’t even have to tell her what I want, because she is already lifting her hands to meet mine. Our palms touch. Our fingertips press together, nails clacking gently. Her hands are the exact same size as mine, give or take a millimeter on her middle finger, and I realize then that there are no roles between us. There is no mating ritual, no demoralizing yield of power as there always is with men. When I move, she moves with me. We mimic one another, mirror one another, protect one another.  

“Stay,” she whispers. 

So I do—and it is equal parts leap and surrender.  

—————————————————— 

At 5 a.m. the following morning, I creep into the bedroom I’ve been sharing with my Irish-Catholic grandmother at the B&B on St. Stephen’s Green. My hair is tangled. My neck is dappled with bruises, like a bunch of ripe blueberries burst open on the supermarket floor. My grandmother is still sleeping. Her chest swells gently, thoughtlessly, the way I imagine a baby’s might, even though there is so much here that could disturb her. The faint sliver of sunrise peeking in through the curtain. My uncle’s barbaric snoring, audible even from his bedroom two doors down. Or the rustle of linen sheets as I slip into my bed and fasten my sleep mask over my eyelids, so that, when she does wake, it will seem as if I’ve been dozing beside her all along. 

And as my grandmother moves through her daily routine—hobbling about the room on her cane, opening this drawer, then that drawer, because she’s certain her dentures are around here somewhere—she will be totally oblivious to the shift that has taken place within me. The shift that is taking place right now, unfolding in some secluded corner of my being, where a younger version of myself is carving through space, reaching through the darkness to touch another girl’s body, to feel her warmth and curvature, in a way that came so naturally to me as a child, when my desire was still able to exist without a name. A shameless self. A hopeful self. One that I am determined not to stifle any longer. She deserves to be happy, I think, as I lay in this foreign bed, swaddled in blankets and pretending to dream. She deserves to yearn freely, love endlessly, parade through life with her heart on display. Her precious little girl-heart, which beats within me still, and, by some miracle, has room enough for everyone.

Katie McHugh is a writer from Long Island, NY. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in BULL Magazine, Folly Journal, and Riddle Fence, among others. Reach her on Instagram @katiexmchugh or visit her at www.katiemchugh.com.