12. Chapter 12
JO
Jo woke up with Charlotte in her arms.
She didn't move. Just lay there, feeling the warmth of Charlotte's body against hers, watching the morning light trace patterns across the ceiling.
This was real. This had happened.
Charlotte shifted, mumbled against Jo's shoulder.
"Good morning," Jo said softly.
"Morning." Charlotte's voice was rough with sleep. "What time is it?"
"Don't know. Don't care."
Charlotte laughed and burrowed closer. "Best answer."
They lay there, tangled together, and rightness filled her chest. Completeness. The feeling of finally being exactly where she was supposed to be.
"We should tell the family," Jo said eventually.
Charlotte went still. "Today?"
"Sunday dinner. Everyone will be there." Jo kissed Charlotte's hair. "I want them to know."
"They already know."
"They think they know. But I want to..." Jo struggled for words. "I want to do it properly. Stand up and say it. Make it official."
"A declaration."
"Exactly." Jo grinned. "A big, dramatic declaration. Like in the movies."
Charlotte propped herself up on one elbow, studying Jo's face. "You're serious."
"Very serious." Jo traced Charlotte's jaw. "I spent a decade being oblivious. I want to make up for lost time. I want everyone to know how I feel about you."
Charlotte's expression went tender. "You don't have to do that."
"I know. I want to."
"It might not go the way you expect."
"What do you mean?"
Charlotte's smile was knowing. "Nothing. You'll see."
Sunday dinner was louder than usual.
Lucy had discovered she could do cartwheels, and she was demonstrating this fact loudly and repeatedly. Valentina was arguing with her husband about the baby's sleep schedule. Grandpa Isaac was complaining about the soup. Grandma Ruth was ignoring everyone and doing whatever she wanted.
Jo sat at her usual spot, Charlotte beside her. Their knees touched under the table. Every time Charlotte looked at her, Jo's pulse tripped.
"You two seem happy," Valentina observed.
"We are," Jo said. "Very happy."
"That's good. Charlotte deserves to be happy." Valentina paused. "So do you, I guess."
"Thanks for the ringing endorsement."
"I'm your sister. It's my job to give you backhanded compliments."
Under the table, Charlotte's hand found Jo's. Jo squeezed it.
Soon, she thought. I'll tell them soon.
The meal progressed. Jo kept trying to find the right moment. But every time she was about to speak, someone else started talking, or Lucy did another cartwheel, or Grandpa needed more soup.
Finally, during a lull, Jo stood up.
The table went quiet. Everyone looked at her.
"I have an announcement," Jo said.
Her heart was pounding. This was it. The big moment. The declaration she'd been planning since she woke up this morning.
"Charlotte and I..." She took a breath. "We're together. Like, together together."
The table went quiet.
Jo waited for the gasps. The shocked expressions. The flood of questions.
Instead, Grandma Ruth just looked at her.
"Dear," Grandma said slowly, "yes. We know."
"What?"
"You and Charlotte. We've been waiting for you to finally say that for years."
"No! This is—I'm coming out! This is a big deal!"
Grandma's expression sharpened with concern. "You mean this is the first time you're telling us out loud?"
"GRANDMA."
Valentina was covering her mouth, trying not to laugh. "I mean... yeah? Lucy's been calling her Aunt Charlotte since she could talk. Why did you think I never questioned whether she belonged here?"
"Because she's part of the family!"
"Because I knew she was family long before you figured out why."
Jo looked around the table. Everyone was nodding. Grandpa Isaac. Valentina's husband. Even Lucy, who'd stopped mid-cartwheel to listen.
"You all thought..." Jo couldn't finish the sentence.
"That you two were in love?" Valentina supplied. "Obviously. You live in each other's pockets. You've been inseparable since college. You look at each other like—"
"Like you hung the moon," Grandma finished. "Both of you. Since you were girls."
"Your grandmother has always noticed a pretty face," Grandpa Isaac added, almost absently. "Linda Potters nearly kept that bakery in business all by herself. I always thought Jo had your grandmother's eye."
Jo's entire system was crashing. She looked at Charlotte, desperate, and found her laughing. Tears streaming down her face, hand over her mouth, shoulders shaking.
"You knew," Jo said. "You knew this would happen."
"I suspected." Charlotte wiped her eyes. "They've been giving me knowing looks for years. I just never corrected them."
"Because you were hoping they were right," Grandma said gently.
"Because I was terrified they weren't."
Jo sat down heavily. "So... no one is surprised. At all."
"Honey." Valentina reached across the table and patted Jo's hand. "The only person who didn't know you were in love with Charlotte was you."
"That's extremely embarrassing."
"Yes, it is."
"I thought I was making a big romantic gesture."
"You were," Charlotte said, leaning into her side. "It just went a little differently than you expected."
"Differently." Jo laughed, shaky. "I just announced my relationship to a room full of people who've apparently been waiting for us to get together for a decade."
"Welcome to the club," Grandma said dryly. "Now, does this mean I can finally start planning the wedding?"
"GRANDMA."
"What? I've been designing the chuppah in my head for years. I have ideas."
Jo pressed her hands to her face. Charlotte was still laughing beside her. The whole table had erupted into conversation: debates about wedding venues, arguments about who had known first, Lucy asking loudly if this meant Aunt Charlotte was her aunt "for real now."
It wasn't what Jo had imagined. It wasn't the dramatic revelation, the shocked faces, the moment of triumph.
It was better.
Because everyone already loved Charlotte. Everyone had already accepted her as family. Jo's declaration mattered; it just wasn't a shock.
"I'm an idiot," Jo muttered into her hands.
"Yes," Charlotte agreed. "But you're my idiot."
"That counts, I guess."
"It's everything." Charlotte pulled Jo's hands away from her face and kissed her softly in front of everyone—Grandma, Lucy, Grandpa Isaac, the whole loud family who had made room for Charlotte long before Jo understood why that mattered.
"Oh thank god," Valentina said. "Do you know how hard it's been not to say anything? Every time you talked about Charlotte, I wanted to scream."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"Because you clearly weren't ready to hear it." Valentina shrugged. "Some things you have to figure out for yourself."
"That's what Grandma said."
"That's because I raised her right," Grandma said. "Now, about the chuppah."
"We're not planning a wedding yet," Jo said firmly.
"Yet." Grandma's eyes sparkled. "I heard a 'yet.'"
Charlotte's hand found Jo's under the table again. Squeezed.
Yet, Jo thought. Not never. Just... not yet.
But looking at Charlotte—flushed from laughing, fingers still linked with Jo's under the table, utterly unafraid to be seen now—Jo thought maybe "yet" wasn't very far away at all.
They walked home through the cold dark, Charlotte's hand in Jo's coat pocket with hers, their fingers tangled together.
Jo was still buzzing. Still processing the cosmic unfairness of planning her big moment only to discover the moment had happened years ago without her.
"I can't believe Grandpa compared us to him and Grandma," Jo said. "I can't believe he brought up Linda Potters at my coming-out dinner."
"He was proud of you." Charlotte's voice was softer than expected.
Jo glanced at her. The streetlight caught the wet shine on Charlotte's lashes, and Jo's heart clenched.
"Hey." Jo stopped walking. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong."
"You're crying."
"I'm not crying."
"Lottie."
Charlotte laughed, wiped her eyes with the back of her free hand. "Fine. I'm a little overwhelmed."
"Because of Grandma? I know she can be a lot with the wedding talk..."
"Because they already loved me." Charlotte's voice broke on it. "I spent years thinking there had to be a condition hidden somewhere. That if I wanted too much, if I crossed the wrong line, they'd finally look at me the way my parents did." She swallowed. "And Ruth is planning a chuppah."
Jo's chest ached. She thought about Charlotte at nineteen, showing up at the restaurant with garbage bags full of her things and nowhere to go. Grandma had fed her soup and made up the spare room and never asked a single question until Charlotte was ready to answer them.
"Of course they love you," Jo said. "They've loved you since you walked in the door."
"I know that now. I think I've known it for a while." Charlotte looked down at their joined hands. "But knowing you're welcome and hearing someone plan to keep you forever are different things. Your grandmother has been designing a chuppah, Jo. For us."
"For us."
"For us." Charlotte breathed the word like she was testing its weight. "I've never had an 'us' before. Not like this."
They started walking again. The city was loud around them: a cab honking, someone arguing into a phone, the distant bass thump from a bar on the corner. But inside Jo's chest, everything was quiet.
"Can I ask you a question?" Jo said.
"Always."
"When you came out to your parents and they... when that happened. Did you think you'd ever have this? Any of this?"
Charlotte was quiet for half a block. "No," she said finally. "I thought that was the trade. Being honest about who I was meant losing the people who were supposed to love me no matter what. I thought that was just the price."
"That's a terrible price."
"It was. And then your grandmother handed me a bowl of soup and told me I looked too thin, and I thought maybe the price wasn't as fixed as I'd believed." Charlotte's grip tightened in Jo's pocket. "But I never let myself count on it. Not completely. Because things you count on can be taken away."
Jo stopped again. Turned to face Charlotte on the sidewalk, the two of them lit by the warm yellow glow of a bodega awning.
"No one is taking this away," Jo said. "Not your parents, not the universe, not my complete inability to notice things that are right in front of my face.
" She brushed a tear from Charlotte's cheek with her thumb.
"You have me. You have the family. And I know I'm late, but I'm here now, and I'm not going anywhere. "
Charlotte's smile was small and real and wrecked. But it faded.
"Jo."
"Yeah?"
"Can you stop saying that? The blind thing. The oblivious thing."
Jo blinked. "I was just—"
"I know." Charlotte's voice was careful. "But every time you say you didn't notice, I hear that I spent years being invisible. And I know that's not what you mean. But it's what I hear."
Jo's stomach dropped. She replayed it in her head — my complete inability to notice things — and heard it the way Charlotte must have. Not self-deprecating. Not funny. Just a reminder that Charlotte had loved her openly enough for everyone else to see, and Jo had looked right through it.
"I'm sorry." Jo's voice came out rough. "I didn't think about how that sounded."
"I know you didn't. That's not a criticism."
"It should be." Jo took Charlotte's hands. Held them tight. "I won't say it again."
Charlotte studied her face. Whatever she saw there must have been enough, because her expression softened.
"You know what scares me?" she said.
"What?"
"I believe you." Charlotte kissed her, soft, tasting like Grandma's chicken soup and salt from tears. "That you'll change. That you'll stay. That's new."
They walked the rest of the way home pressed together, hip to hip, sharing warmth against the night air.
Jo's mind was already racing, not with plans or declarations or grand gestures, but with a quieter resolve.
Charlotte had given her years of patience.
Years of careful, measured love, never asking for anything in return.
Jo wanted to give her that in return. Not a gesture. A life.
She didn't know what that looked like yet. But watching Charlotte unlock her apartment door, watching her glance back with those still-wet eyes and that fragile, wide-open smile, Jo knew she was going to figure it out.