Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kim
Eventually, of course, they go to bed. It’s eleven. The wine is drunk. The moon has risen, and the stars are glowing in brilliance. All is quiet from Bella and Cami’s tent. One torch is on, a dim glow under the nylon. Kim will have to charge it tomorrow.
She and Danika take it in turns to walk to the toilet block, so that one of them is there if the girls wake up.
Danika is in bed first. Kim watches her shape through the tent walls, her silhouette moving around as she changes into pyjamas. Torchlight wavers on the walls and then settles.
Kim gives Danika a few minutes longer. She doesn’t want it to appear she’s deliberately giving her privacy, nor does she want Danika to be uneasy if she comes in when she’s changing. She wouldn’t worry with any of her other friends, but with Danika it’s different.
Danika is possible.
She clears her throat and unzips the tent flaps. “I’m coming in.”
Danika shines the torch at the flaps, and Kim is momentarily blinded. She raises a hand to shield her eyes.
“Sorry,” Danika says and drops the beam. It plays across her feet and lower legs.
She’s wearing not pyjamas, but an oversized t-shirt. Grey, with a picture of Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the front and the words, The Notorious RBG. Below Ruth, Danika’s legs are bare from the tops of her thighs down to her fine, arched feet.
Kim swallows. Danika’s slender legs are making her stomach swirl around in nervous anticipation. Crazy, because there’s no promise for tonight. No promise at all, if she’s honest. There’s just the hope of a promise in the future. A whisper of a future time.
Danika is still underweight, although not alarmingly so. Her legs have a curve to them that was lacking at their earliest meetings. Even in the torchlight, she can see where Danika’s tan line ends on her legs.
“Can you see okay?” Danika asks.
Kim snaps out of her spellbound torpor.
“Yes, thanks.” She finds her sleepwear—a singlet that leaves her arms bare, and a pair of cotton boxer shorts.
She turns away from Danika, pulls off her shirt and bra, and puts on the singlet. The boxers are more of a problem.
She gropes for them, using it as an excuse to glance at Danika, who lies on her side, facing away from Kim.
So, not desperate to see her then. Disappointment twinges, although really, what did she expect?
Quickly, she changes into the boxers and pushes her dirty clothes down to the bottom of the tent, underneath her sleeping bag.
She lies on her back; the bag pushed to her waist, one leg out, one leg in.
“Comfortable?” Danika asks.
“Yes.” She wriggles a little, aware of a stone underneath her, and the hard ground. It’s always the same, first time camping in a while. Her hips will be sore tomorrow, but the next night they’ll be fine. Amazing what you can get used to.
“I am too,” Danika says.
The sleeping bag rustles, and when Kim next looks, Danika’s on her side, facing toward Kim. There’s a decent amount of space between them. It’s lucky they have the large tent.
“This feels like a teenage sleepover,” Danika says. “Like I’m fifteen again.”
“I didn’t have many of them.” Kim folds her arms behind her head. “We moved around a lot as kids, and often I joined a class in the middle of the school year. Friendships were pretty much set in stone then. Oh, I had friends, but not the best-friends, sleepover, secret-telling kind.”
Danika snorts. “Believe me, it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Not everything that happens at sleepovers stays at sleepovers.”
Kim wonders which of Danika’s secrets were retold in daylight. “What secrets would you tell me?” The words are out before she can rethink them.
Danika’s eyes crinkle in the torchlight. “Are you asking for a game of truth or dare?”
“Definitely not. It was more of an idle question.”
“It didn’t sound idle to me.” Danika’s sleeping bag rustles, and she’s suddenly closer. “But maybe I’d tell you that since meeting you—”
“Since I forced my way into your life, you mean.”
“There is that.” A pause. “But since I met you—and at the time I thought it was the end of my world—I’ve relearned…
Maybe not happiness. Not yet. But I’ve relearned the potential for that.
I don’t know that I can ever let go of what Chris did to me—to us—but I’m trying.
I have to, so that it doesn’t eat me up. ”
“Remember the good times.”
“Yes.” Another pause. “But I don’t want to talk about Chris, even though I was the one who brought him up.”
“What do you want to talk about?” Kim asks. She can almost hear her heart beating in the quiet tent. A wave rumbles to shore, then another, as she waits for Danika’s answer.
“Us,” Danika says. “I want to talk about us. And…where we go from here.”
Kim’s breath catches in her chest, a suspended moment that’s neither inhale nor exhale. “What do you mean?”
“You’re becoming important to me.” Danika looks down at the space between them.
She picks at a loose thread on her sleeping bag.
“I don’t know how to say this. Especially as I don’t have your knowledge of how it is between women.
But I’m comfortable with you. Maybe even more so than with Mirza.
At first, I thought it was because of the girls.
That their closeness was somehow making me more receptive to you. But I don’t think it is.”
Kim waits. She’s not sure where Danika is going with this.
Danika raises her head and stares Kim straight in the eyes.
“This will sound weird. But I have…thoughts about you. I don’t think of you entirely as a friend.
I don’t think of you as the woman who took my husband anymore.
But I do think of you. Often. And when we nearly kissed…
I think of that all too much, and I wonder…
” Her fingers twitch on the sleeping bag.
Has reality become twisted? Of all the things she thought Danika might say, she never expected such raw honesty, such bravery, such an unveiling of her feelings.
Memories surface of times when Kim declared her burgeoning feelings. A risk taken, only to be friend-zoned in the nicest way, or, on one embarrassing occasion, laughed at, and then humiliated when Melissa told her friends about Kim’s declaration.
Kim shifts her bag closer to Danika’s. The space between them—both physical and emotional—has narrowed to a sliver. “Thank you. For your honesty. And boldness. Thank you for gifting me your feelings.”
“It’s okay if you don’t return them,” Danika says.
“I’m not even sure myself what they are yet.
If I’m confused. If I’m clinging to you for other, less healthy reasons.
If I’m trying this to give Cami and Bella something more.
If, in some weird and twisted way, I’m seeing you as a replacement for Chris.
Even if this is some fucked-up revenge fantasy. ”
“Ssh.” Kim places a gentle finger on Danika’s lips.
Danika’s eyes, wide and startled, stare at her.
“I’ve been wondering too. About myself. About us. About what we could be if we only let ourselves. If you wanted.”
Danika heaves a breath, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “Will you kiss me? Properly? If you want to, of course. If you don’t, that’s okay.”
“I want. Right now, it’s all I can think of.”
“Then please…”
Danika seems frozen in place. Despite her request, for all her words, her body language is reserved, folded in.
Gently then.
Slowly, so Danika can move away if she wants, Kim leans closer. Her fingers dance a path along Danika’s shoulder, glide up the side of her neck where a pulse pounds. She strokes a finger along Danika’s jawline, circles the point of her chin, and continues up the other side.
Danika’s breathing is loud in the tent. Somewhere outside of this cocoon, their daughters sleep, the surf crashes, and there’s a quiet hop-hop of a grazing kangaroo. But in the here and now, there’s only Danika, staring at her hopefully, nervously, in the torchlight, her eyes wide.
And then Danika is the one who moves. She leans in, and Kim’s fingers fall away from Danika’s face. Her breath puffs on Kim’s skin, and then her lips touch down in a butterfly kiss. Like the breath of wings, like starlight tumbling from the sky.
Oh. Kim closes her eyes as the kiss lifts like a butterfly from a flower, then returns to alight upon her lips again.
Emboldened, she leans into the kiss, makes it something more, something that isn’t friendship, but isn’t lovers. Not yet.
Maybe never? She doesn’t know, but she’s in this now, and she’s not turning back.
She presses her lips to Danika’s, and they yield under hers.
They are soft and warm, like most women’s lips, but there’s a tremor to them that is delightful.
Kim caresses gently, coaxing Danika’s lips apart, just a little, to trace the inner surface with her tongue.
She pushes her fingers into Danika’s hair.
Danika moans, a breathy sound, and her mouth opens under Kim’s.
Kim dances her tongue over Danika’s lips again, and the taste of her makes her head spin. If this is all there is, if this is Danika experimenting, if reality bites in the morning, they will have had this kiss and nothing can erase that.
She opens her eyes, sees Danika’s pale skin washed golden in the torchlight.
And then Danika rolls onto her back without releasing Kim.
She’s pulled down so that she’s lying half on top of Danika.
Their breasts press together, Kim’s leg slides over Danika’s, and Danika’s arms wrap around Kim as if afraid she will withdraw.
No hope in hell of that, unless it’s what Danika wants.
The kiss deepens.
Danika arches her back, pushing her breasts into Kim’s. Sparks arc between them. Kim is sure they must be visible in the air, sure their passion will set the tent alight.
But she mustn’t presume. She draws back, enough to put air between their lips. “Are you okay? Is this what you want?”
“It’s what I want. Truly it is.”
But her words don’t match the tiny flinch of withdrawal.
Kim goes cold. She’s overstepped, read this wrong, and now it will be the worst sort of uncomfortable.
Danika presses a hand to Kim’s cheek. “No! It’s not what you’re thinking. The girls. They’re so close. And if they should wake…I can’t… here.”
She’s right.
Wherever they are going, whatever they are going to do, it can’t be now.
Not with Bella and Cami sleeping only a metre or so away.
If they wake, call out, or if they just hear.
She pulls back, slips off Danika and moves back to her own sleeping bag, pulls the liner over her, the polyester shiny and artificial against her skin.
For a moment, she thinks of the touch of Danika’s legs.
She nods, the words, “you’re right” scratching in her throat. She rolls onto her side, facing Danika. “What do you want to do now?”
“Now?” Danika hums. “Do you mean now, this moment, or now, going forward?”
“I meant going forward, but I’ll take either answer.”
“Now, I’m going to have some water, stick my head out the tent to see if we’ve woken the kids, and then I’m going to try to sleep. I think my dreams will be interesting.”
“And the future?”
“I don’t know, Kim. I really don’t know. But”—she reaches out a hand and touches Kim’s arm, then withdraws—“this wasn’t some whim, some experiment. I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Every sapphic journey has to start somewhere.”
“Is that what this is?” Danika smiles, shadowy in the dim light.
“Only you can know that.”