All Six Strings

What is love?

"Sweet Jesus! You're gonna be so hungover tomorrow!" Delia proclaimed of an extremely unsteady Brianna as she deposited on the bed where she swayed, grinning stupidly.
"Hmm" she hummed, giggling while Delia retreated to the washroom across the hall and wet a face-washer and filled a glass of water. When she returned to Brianna's room, she'd slumped sideways and was lying against the headboard like a dressed up rag doll.
"Ahh, no you don't. Come on! Drink. Wash. Then sleep" Delia ordered, gliding  over and hauling Brianna up by her armpits with a grunt. She swing her legs onto the bed where she proceeded to wash Branna's face free of most of the makeup.
"Nnaaawwwhhh. You' so so sweet! That chick's so lucky. Lucky lucky lucky" Brianna clucked, rocking her head back and forth like a child bent on not taking their medicine. Delia stopped short of taking up the glass of water and sat on the bed beside Briannas legs.
"Oh? That chick?" she prompted, curious but knowing Brianna may not be the most reliable of narrators in that moment.
"The tiny red one" slurred Brianna waving a hand about expansively, eyelids drooping.
"Ahh, the small red one's a chick is she?" Delis asked somewhat sarcastically, though privately she pondered this a little more deeply than she let on. It was true, she had not known how she was supposed to read her, erring with the neutral them pronoun in the vague belief she would ever see them again.
"What?" Brianna asked, momentarily sobering up. She must have noticed Delias downcast eyes and hands fidgeting with the now foundation and mascara stained towel. She looked up and over at Brianna, then handed her the glass of water, which she took and sipped, spilling a little down the side of her face.
"I donno. I mean, I donno if anyone's ever given me goosebumps just by looking at me before. Donno if that means I've now got a crush on them or whether that was just their androgyny messing with my head. I had no idea how in the hell to read them when they dropped that overcoat" Delia confessed, finding herself feeling relaxed and disinhibited, knowing how little of this Brianna would actually remember the next morning.
"Yeah, they kinda strike me as andro too. It's a good look. You know?" Brianna said hiccuping and sipping more of the water Delia had given her.
"But ... does that mean ... that ... I'm into girls now? I mean I'm pretty sure this persons at least assigned female" Delia asked, acutely aware of how childish she sounded in that moment. Brianna paused, looking at her and slowly blinking as though trying to keep her in focus.
"So-h'whad-if-you-are? Even if it's just this one girl" she said, some of her words blurring together in a drunken slur.
"Never happened before ..." confessed Delia, shrugging. It she were honest, she was truly thrown by the effect the red headed guitarist had on her that evening. As crushes went, she could count the instances thereof on one hand, since the age of about fifteen. All of which times, other boys in her year had been the object. None at university though given that every spare effort while training was aimed at passing her exams and practicals this new crush, as Brianna put it was uncharted territory.
"You're all confused now. And you wouldn't be if this were just a little crush. Jus' chill" Brianna sighed, letting her eyes close and the glass of water teeter and threaten to spill. She was surprisingly articulate given her blood alcohol level. Delia lunged forward to take it from her slack hand. Within seconds, Brianna was snoring, her words hanging in the air as though suspended in molasses. Delia pushed her further onto her bed so she wouldn't just roll right off in the night and threw a light blanket over her before turning the light off and retreating to her own bedroom.
She shrugged off her dress and slipped into a pair of sweats and a baggy T-shirt before going to brush her teeth. Climbing onto her own bed and settling down in the velvety darkness of the very early morning, she lost herself in thought. The image she had captured of Shaman in her mind shimmered at the edges like a mirage, their frame lost in baggy jeans and an oversized shirt with a guitar hanging around their neck. The image ran their hand through their hair, combing it free of its bun to fall about their face in waving fiery locks. As though seeing them through a thick pane of glass, Delia saw them strum the guitar noiselessly. She watched the mental image turn around and walk away toward the blurred smudge of a drummer, turn their head and wink one of their emerald green eyes. She watched them disappear and felt a pit open in her stomach. She opened her eyes to stare directly into the abyss-like darkness of her bedroom, wide-eyed, shaken. Yet again, goosebumps rose like hives up her arms, her heart fluttered as though she'd suddenly developed an arrhythmia and her stomach flipped. But her lips were pulled apart in a smile despite this. For a moment, or perhaps for an eternity, she simply smiled into the darkness in the privacy of her bedroom. In the wake of the diminishing mental image, the reality of this situation filled in the space and crowded out the fuzz and the vague sense of joy. Her smile faltered as the fact of the unknown first name among other things hit her in the gut like a suckerpunch, winding her. She rolled over and hugged the spare pillow, closing her eyes and swallowing the lump that had risen in her throat. 'What if I never see them again?' she thought to herself.
'Perhaps, she could frequent The Eight Bar in the interim between now and clinicals' she carried on internally. 'Maybe then I might run into them again. Maybe then I may have worked up even a little bit of the courage it'll take to say literally anything to them'. With eight weeks of clinical placement stretched out ahead of her, who was to say when she'd run into The Major Third again?  Eight weeks for the beautiful redhead to forget she even existed. Eight weeks for she herself to fade away into the flurry of faces the band plays to, into the crowds on campus, into the peripheral of any given audience.
As Delia let her eyes close and her mind drift off to sleep, her dreams were peppered with distorted and broken images of the guitarist Shaman. Playing their instrument with and without the rest of the band, their eyes shining like bright green emeralds. In one, they were kissing the blond drummer. The images elicited in Delia the same discomfort she thought she'd experience if she ever saw her ex make eyes at anyone else let alone Sarah or Brie, only much worse. It made her itch, her heart race and her face grow hot with a bubbling anger that she couldn't understand. It was hell. She awoke after what felt like no time at all to hear the sound of Brianna being sick across the hall.
She sighed heavily and she swung her legs out of bed. checking the time as she went. It was ten fifteen in the morning.
She took several deep breaths and let her heart rate return to normal, holding the details of the dream in her adept working memory for as long as she could, scrutinising them as she made her way to the shared bathroom to check on her flatmate.
Shamans countenance emanated both queerness and confidence from every pore, she could likely have any other human who so much as caught their fancy. Delia herself, a person who may or may not have always been bisexual was out of their league. A one-off meet cute in a bar at the end of exams was too much of a fluke. If Shaman was with somebody else, Delia didn't think she could stand to find out. She felt a aching longing loom out of the memory of them playing on stage, their androgynous brand of unflinching confidence radiating from them with each beat of the drums. As she stood outside the bathroom door, she heard Brianna retch again and pushed it open. Brianna was hunched over the toilet, head disappearing into it, dry heaving.