Begin Again | ongoing - Chapter 39: Chapter 39

The first time Sunny came to Lickety Split was three days after she woke up in the wrong year, when she forgot about her girlfriend and she drank too much and she fell into an existential crisis. The second time, this time, she has been in this new life for almost three weeks and she feels like a different person. Funny, really, when that's how she felt last time too. Except now it's in reverse. Now she feels like she is different to the person she was before; now she feels like she is the person everyone else has known for the last year. As though her selves have been married. Before Sunny and After Sunny.
Now she is just Sunny. Sunny with a bit of a memory problem, sure, but she's working on it. Not that the drinks are helping. The rate she's pounding the pink pussy cocktails at, she may not remember tonight by the time tomorrow rolls around, but right now, in this moment, under the flashing lights and surrounded by her friends, everything feels shiny and new and perfect.
The night is young. Embarrassingly young. It isn't even nine o'clock yet but Sunny's three cocktails deep and she forgot to eat lunch (don't tell Viv) and she is already loose on her feet, her smile loose on her lips. She's in the middle of the dancefloor, the music pounding, a song she doesn't recognize but it feels familiar all the same, and her arms are around Viv. Her girlfriend. The woman she loves. The woman she literally stepped through time for.
"I fucking love you!" Sunny shouts over the music, her hair flying in her face. Viv is a blur in front of her as they spin like a couple of kids in the playground, laughing through her curls when her scrunchie falls out and her hair flies around her. The lights are flashing in time with the heavy beat of the music, bass that throbs out of the speakers, the walls vibrating.
"I fucking love you too," Viv says, and they're in a safe space, this buzzing little pocket of queerness in the middle of Black Sands, so they kiss in the middle of the room. Sunny's sure fireworks are erupting inside her head. Bright spots of colour flashing behind her eyes; popping explosions in her ears. Her hands are in Viv's curls, holding her close. They stop spinning, an island embrace in the middle of the dance floor.
"No PDA on the dance floor," comes a deep, unfamiliar voice. Sunny blushes and spins around, only to come face to face with Ravi.
"Ravi!" she cries out, throwing herself at him and almost knocking him flat on his arse. It's been over a week since she last saw him, and that borders on criminal: Viv may be her girlfriend, but Ravi is her person. "I missed you so fucking much."
Ravi laughs and squeezes her tight. He and Fraser have only just got back from a couple of days his parents: the drink in his hand is his first. He has a lot of catching up to do if he's going to match Sunny's energy level.
"I missed you too, Sunshine," he says, back to his normal voice, raising his glass at her. "Pink pussy?"
Sunny gasps. "That's a very personal question, Mr Patel."
Ravi laughs and catches Viv's eye and says, "Maybe no more for this one for a while."
Except Viv has had three vodka lemonades and there's a sparkle in her eye that any magpie worth its salt would love to steal, and Ravi's words fly over her head as she sashays over and pulls him into a hug.
"Hey! Not without me!" Sunny cries out, wriggling into the hug so she is squashed between them. Viv kisses her left cheek. Ravi kisses her right cheek. In this moment, Sunny feels so impossibly loved that it's almost too much; she almost dissolves into a puddle of emotion again. That might be the alcohol talking.
The three-person hug soon becomes six when Fraser, Delilah and Fenfen join in on the action. They're getting funny looks from other people in the club but Sunny couldn't care less. When she ends up in the middle of the group, surrounded by her four best friends and the woman she loves (Luke and Ionie are here somewhere, too, but neither of them know Sunny well enough to join the action), she raises her hands and beams into the bright lights and dances like no-one is watching.
After several minutes, when the circle disbands, Sunny catches Ravi by the elbow and pulls him to the booth, tripping over nothing and whacking her ribs on the table with a muttered Jesus fuck.
"It's been forever," she says once they're both sitting down. She takes a sip of his drink; it doesn't bother him that she uses his straw.
"We've gone a week without seeing each other before," he says with a fond smile. "Granted, it doesn't happen often. Have I missed much?"
Sunny laughs. Oh, god, he has missed so much. "I'll catch you up when my head is clearer." She gestures to several empty glasses that have yet to be cleared away by the bartender who has had to sweep the table a couple of times already. "It's going to be so weird not living down the road from you anymore."
"Wait, you're moving out?"
She nods, giving him a sad little pout even though she can't wait to live with Viv, can't wait for that airy flat to be hers.
"Sunny! Oh my god! Are you moving in with Viv?"
She nods again. "I'm going to miss you so much."
Ravi laughs and pulls her into a hug. She is comforted by his smell, the same smell that has clung to him for as long as she has known him – the fresh, clean scent of his aftershave (Cool Water by Davidoff, which he discovered in 1993 and has worn every day since) and that pencilly smell of wood and graphite that lingers on his fingers and behind his right ear.
"You'll only be a mile away, Sunny," he says. As they hug, Sunny closes her eyes and breathes in his ever so Ravi smell, and she tries not to cry over the fact that he will no longer be a four-minute walk away.
"It's going to be so weird not living right down the road from you," she says.
Ravi holds her shoulders and says, "We'll see you all the time, Sunny, don't be silly. You'll just have to get a scooter."
She falls against him, her cheek against his collarbone, and she feels her hair ruffle when he laughs. They scoot further into the middle of the booth when the others join them.
"Is it bad luck to sing happy birthday before your actual birthday?" Fraser asks when it still isn't even ten p.m. and the club is filling up and Sunny is having to pace herself because at this rate, she won't make it to midnight; she will sleep through the first minutes of her birthday.
"I don't think so." Viv slings both arms around Sunny, who has lost count of how many cocktails she's had but she has yet to spend a penny because her friends keeping buying her drinks, because she's the almost birthday girl and that, apparently, means her bank account is protected for tonight.
A bonus of that is that she's tipsy enough not to cringe when her friends sing at her, half of them off key and half of them surprisingly able to hold a tune.
"Whoa," Sunny says to Ionie. "You can sing."
Ionie beams and sips her drink and bows her head, one arm slung around Delilah's shoulders. This is the first time Sunny has met Delilah's girlfriend (though she isn't sure if they've reached the stage of calling each other that yet) and she's impressed with how she has slipped into the friendship group with ease. It's a disparate group, these sections of Sunny's life: her randomly assigned flatmates in her first year of university; the girl she met in the campus library the year after that; the girl she has lived with for the last four years; the girl she loves.
Fenfen is on the dance floor with Luke, the two of them putting on a show. It won't be long before Sunny has to use more than one hand to count how many times she has seen Luke – that has never happened with any man of Fenfen's before. Although, at this stage of the night, there's no point trying to count anything as she struggles to get her straw in her mouth to finish the dregs of her god knows what number cocktail she's holding. Seven? Eight? Who knows.
"Do you want to make it to midnight or do you want me to have to pour you into the back seat of a taxi in half an hour?" Viv teases. She has stuck to vodka lemonade. Sunny has drunk anything and everything that has come her way. God knows what Fenfen is drinking – when Sunny stole a sip, she thought she must have tried to drink a candle from the way her throat burned.
"I'm gonna make it," Sunny says with a loopy grin. Her head isn't empty – her head has never been empty – but it is a hell of a lot quieter than it has been lately. Her anxieties are dampened. Her spirits are lifted.
There is nothing she can do to change the past and there is nothing she can do to predict the future, so she is going to have to live in the moment. She turns to Viv, almost slipping out of the booth when she swivels on the vinyl and when she speaks, her words are more coherent than they have been for the last hour or more, even with an alarmingly yellow cocktail in her hand, something Fenfen brought over with a wink.
"You are the best person I ever could've possibly wished for," she says. "In every universe, however many there are"—she glances at Delilah, who is in the middle of a passionate kiss—"I would choose you, Viv. Vivian Galanis. Vivian Dimitra Galanis. I love you so much."
Vivian's grin grows until it reaches her eyes, glistening under the bouncing lights. "How d'you know my middle name?" she asks, her hand sliding up Sunny's arm from her wrist to her shoulder.
"I found it in my diary," Sunny says, laughing at the absurdity that is the idea of her keeping a diary. Viv shares that amusement with a guffaw.
"No way did you keep that diary going."
"That entry may be from the first of January," she admits, touching Viv's freckled cheeks as though she is tracing her fingers over the stars that speckle the night sky.
"You full-named me in your first ever diary entry?" Viv laughs and takes Sunny's hand from her cheek to kiss her knuckles. "Should I be honoured or concerned? What were you writing about me, huh?"
Sunny slurps her offensively bright cocktail. It's violently sweet but it packs a strong kick, mango and sugar and white rum that will curdle with the slew of other liquors sitting in her stomach and her blood. "Something something goddess, I mean, obviously, look at you" —she gestures with the hand holding her drink and spills the neon liquid over her hand— "and something about wanting to marry you."
"You wanted to marry me?" Viv's beam is so bright, so radiant, she is the only illumination Sunny needs.
"Apparently I did," Sunny says. She finds Viv's hand and joins her fingers with her girlfriend's, marvelling at Viv's fingers. Every line, every knuckle. Muscle and skin and bone that work together to hold Sunny's hand, to guide her into this strange new life. She's too drunk for a conversation this big, but it's okay because Viv is too; the words slip through the air between them, unhindered by the gravity they would hold if Sunny could walk in a straight line right now.
"I love you so much, Sunny Shelley," Viv says, pulling Sunny in for a kiss. Her lips are warm and fruity and Sunny is oh so happy to be kissed by her girlfriend, to be in this room, to be here in this life.
"I love you too," Sunny says, but her lips are still pressed to Viv's so her words come out muffled. She leans back, her head spinning like a tumble dryer, her words rambling away when she opens her mouth. "I can't wait to live with you. Me and you and our cat. Wait, you don't want kids, do you? I don't want kids. That seems like something we're supposed to discuss before we move in together?"
Viv laughs. She gently pulls Sunny's bottom lip between her teeth, her nose pressing into Sunny's cheek. "I don't want kids, don't worry," she murmurs.
"Have we talked about this before?"
"Mmhmm. After, like, a month."
"That's very early," Sunny says seriously.
Viv, grinning, says, "I was cooing over my sister's daughter. You pounced on me and said that if I wanted children then we should break up immediately." She presses Sunny's nose and says, "You're all I need, bambi."
They make it to midnight. Just about. It's been a long evening with a lot of alcohol and ten minutes into her birthday, Sunny is ready for bed. After long goodbyes and promises to be safe and to see each other soon, she and Viv leave their friends in the club to finish off the night without them. Sunny is drunk. All giggly and grinning and dancing in the street. The totally taxiless street.
"We'll just walk!" she cries out, grabbing a lamp post and dancing around it. "It's only, like, a mile."
"You think you can walk a mile without falling down?" Viv laughs. She's pretty drunk too. Not as far gone as her girlfriend, and a lot more stable on her feet, but drunk enough that the usual red flags about two young women walking alone after midnight don't wave in her vision.
"I can walk a hundred miles," Sunny says, skipping to the next lamp post and twirling around it. "With you by my side, my dearest darling Vivian, I could go any distance. Any distance at all." She runs and jumps, clicking her heels together like Dorothy. Except she's wearing battered trainers, not sparkly red stilettos.
"Hold my hand," Viv says, reaching out as she quickens her stride to catch up with Sunny, who is darting off towards the next lamp post. Sunny is a goddamn liability when she's had too much to drink, although at least this time she isn't on the cusp of a depressive episode. She is flying high.
"Sunny," Viv calls out. "Hold my hand. You're gonna hurt yourself!"
She's too late. Sunny spins around to face her and she trips, landing on the pavement on her hands and knees with a gasp of pain. Viv rushes over, hauling her to her feet. Sunny sucks in a breath through her teeth, waiting for agony to sink in, but the pain is dulled by her happiness and her blood alcohol level.
"Jesus, Sunny! Are you okay?" Viv cries, grabbing Sunny's wrists to inspect the damage. Sunny sobers up just the tiniest amount when she sees blood mingled with dirt and gravel embedded in the heels of her palms, the same true of her knees.
"Fuck," she says, looking at the mess. In the dim light between lamp posts, the blood trickling down her wrist when she holds up her hand looks black. "It's okay. It doesn't hurt much."
"You're going to feel that in the morning," Viv says. "Come on, we need to get home and clean you up."
Sunny grins and darts forward to kiss Viv's cheek. "Okay," she says, spinning in a circle. "Clean me up, baby!"
Viv rolls her eyes and slips her arm through Sunny's elbow, tugging her towards home. They're not far away. In less than ten minutes, they're standing under the warm glow of the kitchen lights – Viv has dimmer switches, which Sunny marvels at as she sits on the counter next to the sink, gravel and dirt falling from her knees to the floor as she kicks her heels against the cabinet.
Viv runs the hot and cold taps until she has a washing up bowl half full of lukewarm salt water to dunk Sunny's hands in, swirling them around to dislodge the grime of the pavement. Sunny winces at the sting of the water, the burn of the salt.
"You're such a disaster," Viv says with a smile on her face as she patches up Sunny's scrapes, dabbing at her knees with a damp wad of kitchen roll.
"Always have been, always will be," Sunny says, struggling to keep her legs still enough for Viv to clean up her grazes.
"Don't move. I have Savlon somewhere." Viv disappears to the bathroom and Sunny muses over how lucky she is; her musing continues as Viv pats antiseptic cream onto both scuffed knees, both grazed palms.
"If you're looking for a disaster-free girlfriend," Sunny says, "you might need to trade me in."
Viv grins, shaking her head. "I wouldn't trade you for the whole world, Sunny. I love you too fucking much."
"Even when you're picking gravel out of my knees?"
"Especially then." Viv stands to kiss Sunny. "I'd spend every day picking gravel out of your grazes if that's what it takes to be with you."
"I'm very clumsy," Sunny says, her expression as severe as her tone. "That might actually be your future."
Viv stands between Sunny's knees, hands on her thighs. "I can't wait for every day of it."