Chapter 3: Sofia discovery
The rest of her life waited in the wings.
It was messy. It was tears and raised voices and her father, Bill, turning a frightening shade of purple before slamming his hand on the kitchen table and saying he needed air. He didn’t come back that night. He texted her mother, Sofia, hours later: Getting a room near the casino for the week. I can’t process this.
Through it all, Sofia held Wanda’s hands, her own trembling. “You have one hundred percent of my support, baby. One hundred percent.” Her voice was a fierce whisper, a lifeline thrown into turbulent water. Wanda clung to it, even as she saw the confusion swimming deep in her mother’s eyes.
Later, Natasha faced her own parents. Alexei, her father, listened with a blank face, drank a beer in one long pull, and stood up. “A week,” he grunted. “Motel near the bar.” He left without looking at her. Melina, pragmatic as steel, simply nodded. She pulled Natasha into a brief, tight hug. “You are my daughter. That’s it. I want to see how this works out because that’s who i am.” She released her. “I will Tell your sister for you . Yelena’s eighteen. Natasha… there are enough problems with deadbeats. Don’t let his,” she gestured to the door Alexei had left through, “be one of them.”
Juvia’s father, Zach, just stared at the floor. “I don’t… I don’t know how to handle this,” he mumbled, and it was the most honest thing any of the men had said. He went to a hotel for a week. Her mother, Olivia, crushed Juvia in a hug that smelled of lavender and unconditional love. “My water goddess,” she whispered. “My heart is with you.”
And then, the strange quiet.
Wanda was back at the apartment, wrapped in the relief and residual shock with Natasha and Juvia. The world hadn’t ended. It had just fissured, and they were standing on a new, uncertain continent.
Sofia was alone in the house.
The silence was absolute. It pressed in on her. Bill was gone. Wanda was gone, but in a new, profound way that felt more distant than any geography. Sofia made tea. She didn’t drink it. She sat on the couch in the living room, the same couch where she’d sat with Bill for twenty-three years, watching shows they didn’t really follow.
Her mind wouldn’t stop.
She had given her support. She meant it. But deep down, a part of her she was ashamed of, a part that felt clinical and vulgar, was trying desperately to imagine the mechanics of it.
How?
In all the history of humankind, no woman had slept with another woman. Not a single person had slept with more than one person at a time. It was a law of nature, like gravity. You were straight, and you were monogamous. These weren’t choices; they were facts of biology, of the soul. Wanda, Natasha, and Juvia were the first. The very first. The impossibility of it buzzed in Sofia’s skull.
What would it even be like? With a man, you knew. There was a script. An awkward, often dissatisfying script, but you knew your lines. You lay there and you took it because it was a sign of affection, a transaction of connection. The man enjoyed it. You showed you cared by allowing it. That was the pact. You felt nothing, or you faked what you were supposed to feel, and that was that. Why would they do it? Women did it with men because it was expected, because it was the price of love and companionship, even if they got nothing from it.
But between women… where was the engine? The necessary, clumsy part? The idea that a woman could give another woman pleasure, real pleasure, where a man couldn’t… it was heresy. It was an unnerving, thrilling heresy that made her face grow hot.
And then, three of them. Her brain stuttered. How did that work? Did they take turns? Was it a queue? The logistics were baffling. She could only picture their faces—Wanda’s sweet, open expression, the dark-haired one with the sharp eyes, the blue-haired girl with the serene smile. Then, unbidden, the pictures in her mind shed clothes. She saw limbs, not male, familiar limbs, but smooth and curved. She saw contact without the crude, central apparatus of a man. Mouths on skin. Hands. What did hands do? The image was a blur of flesh and feeling, a puzzle with pieces that didn’t exist in her world.
Then her own daughter, Wanda, appeared in the mental tableau. Not as her child, but as a woman. A woman with intent. A woman causing pleasure. Receiving it. Multivaried, simultaneous, a circuit of sensation with no weak link, no passive participant.
Sofia stood up abruptly, her tea cup clattering on the saucer. She walked to the kitchen window, staring out at the dark backyard. Her heart hammered with a strange, illicit rhythm. It wasn’t arousal. It was the vertigo of a fundamental law being broken. The terror and fascination of watching a wall you didn’t even know was there crumble to dust, revealing a landscape you had no language for.
She thought of Wanda’s face, so earnest, so sure. She thought of the low hum of certainty that had seemed to emanate from her. We burn together.
Sofia, alone in the silent house her marriage had built, shivered. She was trying to understand a fire she’d only ever been taught to see as ash.