#Joplitzier but they’re lesbians

[ferylcheryl]

“Ploughman’s Lunch”, in which Evie Little, student at an exclusive all-girls college in the English countryside in 1960s, runs into graduate student and unrequited love object Thora Jopson and her particular friend one night at a certain establishment in the nearby village.

I may finish this and post the full work (probably with some explicit sexual content) on ao3 but for now this feels good where it is and I wanted to share it.

“It’s not what it looks like.”

It’s true—she hadn’t followed them here and she certainly wasn’t going to tell on Thora Jopson about what she’d seen her doing. But damn it if Evie Little doesn’t feel like she’s lying, that old reflexive guilt blazing in her cheeks and thickening like a fist at the base of her throat.

“I did see you,” she continues hoarsely. (Hard to talk with the stranger’s brawny forearm pinning her against the grimy wall of the ladies’ room.) “On the bus up. But I didn’t—”

“I know you saw me on the bus,” Thora says with a small, cool smile. She’s set her clothes aright and lit a cigarette. Evie’s never seen her smoke, but she’s not surprised to see she does it with the same spooky, effortless grace with which she does all things. As she does all things. “You said hello to me.”

Evie nods gratefully. “Yes. You remember.”

“Of course.” Her tone pleasant, precise. “You’d errands to run. I’m just surprised, Ms. Little, that the course of your errands would bring you here.”

“I—please let go, ma’am—I can’t—”

The stranger laughs and releases Evie. She’s a solid-built butch, somewhere between forty-five and fifty, gap-toothed and pock-marked yet strangely compelling nevertheless—a rough charm. Her laughter is only slightly kind.

Thora studies Evie as she catches her breath, calculating. Evie’s scared she’s breathing funny, because that’s what she always does when she has to think about it, has to exist as the focus of another’s perception. It’s very hard. And Thora, goddamn her, is so beautiful Evie feels chastised by it.

“What do you want in a place like this?” She asks at last.

“Ah, don’t be cruel, lass,” the stranger says in a low, sodden voice. Murmurous, a trace of a brogue. “I’m betting she’s here for the same reason you are.” She looks Evie up and down and up again, brow cocked. “I say we buy her a drink.”

The promised drink is a shot of well-whiskey at the bar, one for Evie and one for Frankie (that’s her name, Frankie, this friend of Thora’s), then a couple more. Thora sips lemonade through a red-striped straw, brows lifted in cool amusement. Evie’s not accustomed to any of it—not the burn of the drink in her throat and chest, not the buoyancy it lends her, nor getting to look so freely and for so long at Thora. She lets herself be carried along by it, lets herself bloom into conversation, though sticks as always to the most careful small talk. Faces float out of the crowd, acquaintances mostly to Frankie, are introduced, disappear. Evie has eyes only for Thora.

Yet when Thora asks her to dance, she shakes her head—a startled refusal. For one thing, the whiskey’s turned her step weak and wild and she’s afraid of Frankie besides. Afraid, or—a swift stung something flicks across Thora’s face before she reaches for Frankie instead, and as she watches Frankie, handsome despite a kind of bearish stoop and shuffle, lead Thora into the crowd, Evie realizes she needs Frankie too. Not that she wants her the way she has wanted Thora for three falls and two summers now, Thora the kind of cool shining loveliness she dreamed of before she’d even met her—but there must be some thrust of will involved here, something of more spine and specificity of intent than Evie’s own mute self-consuming or Thora’s… well… who knew what went on behind the unseelie green of those eyes? That was what Evie loved. The immeasurable competence, the engine and the spark so deeply buried beneath the force and fineness of its action.

Thora’s bright white blouse helps Evie track them in the crowd, track them into a corner alongside the low, shallow stage where the band plays its swelling unremarkable music, where, half hidden by a congregation of empty chairs and cut off by the chance whim of architectural angle and the hulks of other bodies, Evie watches Frankie maneuver Thora against the wall, watches her slide her broad, freckled hand up Thora’s skirt, watches them kiss, watches the little quick motions of Frankie’s thin-lipped mouth as she murmurs whatever into Thora’s ear, and Thora nodding, hesitantly at first as though in a dream then more decisively… Frankie’s hand who knows where now, Thora’s knee raised to permit Frankie whatever fumbling about, Thora’s mouth opening around a laugh, even her teeth impeccable and bright like something storebought new. Then they both look at Evie, through the dim and the crowd and the music they see her, and she sees them, and immediately she understands.

She maneuvers to her feet and goes to them.

Frankie’s hands are rough and her fingers calloused and in the brief glare of light in the corridor of her flat—her thumb pressed into Thora’s cheek as she kisses her, skewing the corner of her mouth back from her teeth, and she in turn unlocking the door to the older woman’s flat without even having to look—Evie can see oil beneath her nails. It does not deter Evie because it evidently does not deter Thora, who, once they are inside, boils water for tea and assembles of the mean supplies of Frankie’s bachelor’s pantry a kind of late-night ploughman’s lunch: a squat jar of piccalilli, coarse mustard nearly gone, last scraps of roast beef and some crumbling McVities.

Evie abstains but gratefully accepts tea, which, heated into life on a dingy hotplate and served in three mismatched cups, tastes stronger and more perfect than anything. She’s quite drunk, she realizes, laying her head on her crossed arms. Frankie makes a sweet little sound, sort of sarcastic and fond at once, and then there are fingers in her hair, combing through the roots, massaging the skin beneath. As though she’s a housecat. Evie knows it’s Thora by how good it feels, a soft harmless scratching at the door she is closing behind her as she sinks into sleep.