Chapter 8
Alex woke to gray morning light through the windows and the specific, disorienting warmth of another person pressed against her side.
Dani had migrated closer sometime in the night, or maybe Alex had, it was impossible to say now, tangled together under the blankets with Dani’s head tucked against her shoulder and one arm thrown loosely across her middle.
The fire had burned down to embers. The house was cold everywhere the blankets weren’t.
And Alex lay very still, not wanting to move, cataloguing the strange, unfamiliar comfort of waking up wanted instead of waking up alone.
Dani stirred a few minutes later, blinking up at her with the soft, unguarded confusion of someone not yet fully awake, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, just looked at each other in the gray morning light with none of yesterday’s overcorrection anywhere in sight.
“Hi,” Dani said finally, voice rough with sleep.
“Hi.”
“This is new.” Dani didn’t move away, just shifted enough to look at her properly, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Waking up next to someone. Been a while.”
“How long is a while?”
“Six years, give or take.” Dani said it lightly, but there was something more honest underneath it than there had been the first time she’d mentioned the apartment, the girlfriend, the panic.
“I’ve gotten very good at leaving before morning.
Or making sure there’s never a morning to leave from in the first place. ”
Alex studied her for a moment, the loose hair, the sleep still clinging to the corners of her eyes, the particular vulnerability of a person caught without any of their usual armor on. “And now?”
“Now I woke up and didn’t want to move.” Dani said it like a confession, like it cost her something to admit. “Which is new too.”
They lay there a while longer, the fire down to nothing, the cold creeping in at the edges of the blankets, neither of them in any hurry to break the spell of it.
Eventually hunger won out over reluctance, and they untangled themselves and got the fire going again, and Alex found eggs and the last of the good bread and made something that passed for breakfast while Dani sat cross-legged on the counter, watching her with an attention that felt entirely different from the wary, assessing look she’d worn their first morning.
“Can I say something,” Dani said, once the eggs were plated and they were sitting across from each other at the island, “and you don’t have to say anything back if it freaks you out.”
“Now I’m nervous.”
“Don’t be.” Dani turned her mug slowly between her hands, working up to whatever this was.
“I think the reason I do what I do, the traveling, never staying anywhere long enough to unpack properly, isn’t really about the girlfriend.
Not anymore. I think somewhere along the way it became less about protecting myself from getting hurt and more about protecting myself from finding out I actually want the thing I keep running from. ”
“The permanent thing.”
“The permanent thing.” Dani exhaled, like saying it out loud cost something.
“Because if I let myself want it, and want it with someone specific, and it doesn’t work, or they leave, or I mess it up somehow, I lose the escape hatch I’ve built my entire life around.
Right now I get to tell myself I’ve never really tried, so I’ve never really failed.
That’s safer than actually trying and finding out I’m bad at the one thing everyone else seems to manage. ”
Alex sat with that for a long moment, turning her own coffee mug the same slow way Dani had, feeling the weight of what had just been handed to her.
“I don’t think wanting something and being scared of it are opposites,” she said finally. “I think you can want it exactly as much as you’re scared of it. Might even be proof of how much it matters.”
“That’s either very wise or very convenient for the person hoping I stick around a little longer.”
“Can’t it be both?”
Dani laughed, real and warm, and something in the tension around her shoulders eased. “Fair.”
“For what it’s worth,” Alex added, quieter now, “I spent three years building my entire life around not being blindsided again. Controlling every variable I could get my hands on. And somehow the thing that’s actually happening right now, this, snowed in with a stranger who does yoga and drinks things that look like a science experiment gone wrong, is the first thing in three years that hasn’t felt like bracing for impact. ”
“High praise.”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.” Dani reached across the island, fingers brushing over Alex’s where it rested near her mug, not quite holding on, just touching, testing. “It’s already there.”
Alex turned her hand over, let their fingers actually tangle together this time, no wine, no fire-lit half-dark to hide behind, just gray morning light and eggs going cold and the particular clarity of two people finally admitting, in daylight, sober, exactly what they’d both been circling for three days.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Alex said. “Not with this storm, obviously. But also not, I think, in general. Not unless you want me to.”
Dani’s fingers tightened around hers, and whatever she’d meant to say back seemed to catch somewhere in her throat instead, replaced by something rawer and more honest than words. “I really don’t want you to.”
Outside, the snow had finally slowed to something almost gentle, drifting rather than driving, and for the first time since the storm rolled in, Alex thought that maybe the weather clearing wasn’t something to dread after all.