Boxing Day; Pt 2
As the door clicks shut and the sound of the rain drops out to a dull hum, Dani learns three things.
The first; doorknobs hurt. They hurt an inexplicable amount and Dani can’t say that she’s all that turned off by it.
Jamie has a hunger in her stare as she presses Dani’s shoulders back into the fogged glass. Green [or blue; Dani still hasn’t been able to decide] eyes turn black like the clouds above, the ones that opened up and swallowed them whole as they ran from the garage to the house, and Dani can’t help but wonder if maybe Jamie will do the same. Swallow her whole, right here, right now.
The doorknob hits her square in the back and the pain is welcomed. She’s reminded, quickly, that this moment is real. That everything about this is real. That she left her life and she walked, accidentally on purpose, straight into a new one. She’s reminded that Jamie is real, and that right now the way she’s looking at her is a way that nobody has ever looked at her before. Hungry, restrained and tormented, and all together on fire.
Their last kiss, the first kiss, was sudden and it was the culmination of the overwhelming hunger Dani had been denying herself for decades. It was Jamie’s deep stares and low voice and warm body. It was the crook in her smile, the sweat on her brow, the oil on her lip. It was the dark ink on her skin that Dani was dying to decode. It was all these things at once, and then it was over.
And it would have been easy to write off, to pack up herself and her car and drive back to her old life once the thrill of it all settled, if Dani hadn’t stopped in the rain and looked up. She found answers in the rain. And when she looked down, and looked at Jamie standing there with a sly grin in a tight white t-shirt, soaked through and clinging to her thin frame, she found the questions too. She found the question she had been asking herself since the moment she bolted out of the dressing room and headed north east on the highway.
What do you want? Really want?
And now, with a doorknob in her back and Jamie hovering before her, her hair wet and her lips parted and her breath coming out in hot spurts across Dani’s face, she knows the answer is that she wants this.
And when Jamie leans in close, a whisper on her lips asking Dani if she’s sure, if she’s ready to leap, she can’t find her voice. Just a simple nod, a simple tug on the front of Jamie’s drenched shirt, a simple kiss pressed to the corner of her mouth.
She lingers there for a moment and the world stills. There’s a tension between them, a dense energy that is almost too thick to cut, too present to ignore. There’s something in the anticipation of it all that has Dani closing her eyes and laying her head back on the glass and Jamie shouldn’t follow, she shouldn’t be tethered to her in the way they move, but she is. She is and Dani has to force herself to breathe before she--
She leans up and grabs Jamie’s bottom lip in between her teeth and just like that, the thick fog between them drops, everything suddenly so clear.
The second kiss is different than the first. The first felt like falling, the second feels like leaping.
The cold water drips down from Jamie’s wet hair and onto her dry lips and Dani realizes just how thirsty she’s been, how much she’s been craving to be hydrated.
There’s something in the way Jamie grabs at her jaw, strong hands and long fingers wrapping and gripping and clinging and it’s all the confidence of a woman who has never been denied what she wants, that has Dani opening her mouth, letting a soft moan spill out. Jamie’s nails dig in so hard that Dani is sure there would be - will be, even - marks but she can’t find it in herself to care. It’s even more intoxicating the way she runs the pad of her thumb over Dani’s bottom lip, letting her tongue brush against the back of her teeth.
Dani has never been kissed like this. She’s never been so entirely consumed where she feels every single nerve in her body tingle at the way lips slide from lips to jaw to neck to throat.
Jamie is pressed in, her wet body pushed tightly against Dani’s own, leg slotted between the heavy denim that’s weighing her down and Dani is thankful that something is keeping her anchored to the ground. Jamie rolls her body from toes to fingers and into Dani harder, fuller, faster.
The second thing Dani realizes is how hard it is to remove wet clothes.
Jamie releases her jaw and braces both arms above her head, pinning her in place. It keeps her just off the edge, just out of reach, and Dani is aware that Jamie’s letting her dictate the pace here.
She pulls at the hem of the wet shirt, letting the dampness of it settle into her skin as she tugs her closer. There’s another crack of thunder outside and the way it rattles the door has Dani breaking the kiss and opening her eyes. Jamie is flushed, skin chilled and Dani wants to see if the way her cheeks and neck are painted in a hue of red trails down past the collar of her dirty white shirt.
It’s not easy to peel it off, not with the way it’s sticking to her skin. Not with the way Jamie has her head rested against her temple, breathing hot air into the skin below. Not with the way that she wants to keep kissing her.
Dani’s hands are trembling against the cold skin, very aware that this is far past the point of no return, far past a place she’s ever been, and she only gets it halfway up Jamie’s torso when she’s reaching down and tugging it over her head in one swift movement before moving Dani’s right hand to the clasp of her bra and whispering,
“We’ll go as fast or slow as you want.”
And that’s really all Dani needs to pop it open with her index finger and let it fall away.
Jamie’s mouth is back on her, hungrier, open and wanting and all Dani can think about is where she wants it next. She wants it all at once, everywhere, taking and owning and biting. And it comes out heady and feral when she breathes into her mouth,
“I’m yours. However you want me.”
The third thing Dani learns is that Jamie is incredibly strong.
Strong enough to lift Dani’s legs up around her waist and effortlessly drop her onto the top of the dryer. It’s maddening, the way Jamie has her eyes locked in and the way her mouth doesn’t twitch when she undoes the button at the top of Dani’s jeans and pulls them, and then everything else with it, off slowly. Her boldness is a direct contrast to Dani’s trepidation at being open and bare and naked, spread out before her.
Jamie seems to read this, seems to know exactly what she needs, as she drops to her knees and begins peppering soft kisses at Dani’s ankle, on the inside of Dani’s knees, thighs, the crest of her hip. She seems to know it when she whispers how beautiful Dani is, how brave she is, how wonderful she is, in between each inch of skin under her lips.
And when Jamie taps on the crook of Dani’s knees and beckons her forward, Dani knows what’s coming. She knows it but at the first touch of Jamie’s tongue to the wet, slick heat at the apex of her thighs, she thinks that she couldn’t really have ever prepared for Jamie.
It would be embarrassing, should be, the way she grinds her hips down onto the mouth below. It should be mortifying the way Jamie’s name falls from her lips like a plea. It should be troublesome how Dani bucks and grips and curses and begs. For Dani of yesterday, it would be. Being this unabashed, this unsettled, this undone would be entirely shameful.
But when her hand wraps itself in Jamie’s wet hair, as her moans grow deeper and louder and longer, when the tip of Jamie’s tongue enters her, when she clenches around it with a grunt, when she feels herself release hot and dripping and Jamie laps it up with a gentleness she’s never know - Dani thinks she wouldn’t ever be able to go back. She wouldn’t ever be able to go back to who she was yesterday because, as it turns out, she was a whole different person then.
Dani learns some things about herself too.
Dani, as it turns out, is a big fan of the easy way words roll out of Jamie’s mouth and the way those words send sparks down her spine and make her toes curl back into themselves. She doesn’t know how they make it up to Jamie’s room, or into Jamie’s bed, but she recalls it included wobbly legs and firm hands and being entirely entranced by a half naked Brit who was looking at her like she was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“I want to--but I’ve never, and,”
Jamie had insisted that she was happy to take the lead when she laid her back on unmade sheets and oversized pillows and dipped her head, laying lips on the most sensitive part of Dani’s neck. Her insistence grew as she hovered above, sucking and biting at the pulse point at the bridge between neck and shoulder and it doubled when she brought calloused fingers down to dip in and out and through.
“Fucking shit, Dani, I don’t think you understand what you do to me.”
Dani didn’t need any more assurance that Jamie wanted this, not when two fingers curled inside of her and teeth bit down into her neck and Jamie’s hips moved against her thigh, searching for release of her own.
“That’s it, you’re almost there.”
And as Dani came and shuttered and closed her eyes against the impact of release hitting her again, she found that she wanted to learn more things.
“Can you...show me?”
Turns out, Dani was a fast learner.
They didn’t move, didn’t trade places, didn’t switch positions, as Jamie kept herself propped with on her elbow and took Dani’s hand in her own free one. They didn’t move, didn’t trade places, didn’t switch a thing when Jamie brought Dani’s between her legs and their joined fingers ran up through the dripping wetness there.
“Feel that?” Dani nods and Jamie’s head drops onto her shoulder, biting at the sharp collar bone.
“Just,” Jamie doesn’t finish her sentence as it trails off into a whimper. Their fingers moving in unison in tight circles over the sensitive bundle of nerves, “Fuck. Just do that. Just do what you would do to yourself.”
And Dani thinks she understands why people crave this - this right here, making somebody else reach this peak - when Jamie releases her hand and brings it up to her neck, gripping lightly as she let’s her hips sink down on Dani’s fingers, moving in short thrusts. Because when Jamie comes undone above her with a watery sob in her throat, she thinks she could keep doing this forever.
It’s quiet now. Gasps and pants and moans have faded into soft sighs, long intakes of air, and - though Jamie would never admit this - soft snores.
Dani’s watching her carefully through her dreams. Half draped across, legs tangling up in her own, the sheet resting around her hips, and Jamie’s inked arm curled up under her head.
She feels free now to study the images there. She hadn’t wanted to look before, afraid of the way her eyes would give her away. But now, now she could trace the lines, trying to decode this woman, this dark and mysterious woman, who had entirely captured her every thought. And when she reaches out her hand and her fingers glide across the skin it finds, she lets it. And it was only then that she realizes that the ink was purposeful, it was the same art she found downstairs in the hall. The same art of the farm, of the hills and the house and the barn. It was an exact print, directly on Jamie’s skin, wrapped around her shoulder and elbow and wrist.
And beneath it, beneath the beautiful black and white drawings, was raised flesh. Long thick bands of flesh, marred and warped and raised and--
Burned.
Dani traces the lines delicately. Jamie stirs.
“They are a bit sensitive.” Her voice is raspy and low, eyes blinking open, watching the way Dani’s fingers lift carefully off her skin.
“Oh-- oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t--”
Jamie’s eyes are heavy and soft and Dani feels the way they pull her in.
“S’alright. Just not used to somebody touching it.”
Dani wants to ask, ask what happened, ask if it hurt then, if it hurts now, ask if it was an accident or on purpose or if it’s why she stays out here alone in the woods. But instead she watches the way Jamie’s eyes flick all around and over the scars and she knows that she doesn’t need to ask. She doesn’t, not when Jamie takes a deep breath, opens her mouth and says,
“I came to the states when I was 16. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to do anything at 16, not really, except be a little twat.” She laughs and Dani feels the way her heart grabs at the idea of a pouty teenager stomping around the muddy fields, throwing fits all the way into the sun.
“My dad was from here.” She waves into the air above her head. “This house was his grandparents, and then his parents, and then when they died, he came back and brought me with him.”
Dani watches the way her throat catches and the way her eyes pop and she knows she wants to hear more. She wants to hear everything. “Tell me about him.”
Jamie pulls her arm out from under her head and rolls onto her back, looking up into the still air. “He was a soldier. American. Gritty as they come, and mean. Shit, he could be mean. Never to me, mind you, but to everyone else. He was sharp and tough - had this way about him that you always knew he was angry with the way he would go quiet and his eyes would scream. I guess I got that from him.”
Jamie looks over and her eyes squint into the dark and she must find something in the way Dani is looking at her because when she closes her mouth and breathes through her nose, the next time she opens it, she doesn’t stop.
“My parents, my real mother and father, they never wanted me. She left when I was 5. Just left. Found other things she loved more like booze and drugs and freedom. He didn’t want to be a single dad, didn’t want to raise some brick that was just weighing him down. I was alone most of the time, and I was so sad. I was so alone. I was just a kid, kids can’t raise themselves, can’t feed themselves. And Dennis, my father, he started drinking more and-- there was an accident. Wasn’t his fault, well, at least I told myself for a long time it wasn’t his fault but--”
She swallows down dry air.
“So social services came and then it was foster care, and it was miserable. Houses filled with greasy old men and kids filled to the brim. And one day, I left for school and I never came back. Found myself sleeping in an alley, and then sleeping in a box, and then sleeping on a stoop. I was little, scrappy, and I would steal from people in bookstores and coffee shops. Just pennies, never much, but enough to buy a biscuit and,”
“How old were you?”
“Ten.”
“Ten?”
“I told ya, scrappy little thing.” Jamie winks and Dani feels the tug to her as she rolls in closer, placing a delicate hand over her chest and studying the way she can feel the beating heart beneath her palm.
“So one day I picked the wrong pocket. He caught me halfway out the door. Picked me up in his arms and scolded me. Told me that if I kept going down the road of a vagrant that I’d end up dead. I was ten! He bought me lunch and made me sit but he didn’t make me talk to him. He just told me about his life - his life in America. How he joined the army young, how he got hurt in combat and was discharged, how his wife had passed and how he needed a fresh start, even though he was retired now - far away from the farm he grew up on and the town around it. He was kind and he cared and he told me to come back the next day, and then the next, and then the next. And then one day, he told me that I could have a home if I wanted. And I guess, I guess I wanted a home.”
“So John became Dad and Dad eventually made it official with the courts and bought a flat and we lived quite comfortably - or as comfortably as an older man living off his inheritance and a bratty teenager battling hormones could. Until, well, until he decided it was time for us to come back here and take in this place. So, we did.”
Dani wants more, craves more, she wants details and moments and every thought and feeling Jamie had - has - but she knows that this is already more than she ever expected to get.
“Five years ago, the day before Christmas, we went into town to get a tree. I argued with him that we could just cut down our own tree, we didn’t need to go buy one, but he didn’t want to take away business from some,” her voice drops low and she mimics a midwest accent in the most terrible way, “kind stranger whose entire livelihood is based on people not cutting down their own trees, Jamie.”
“We had this silly tradition of putting up the tree at the last possible fucking moment, but dad loved his traditions. So, we went into town. He was driving, it was dark, it started to snow.” Her voice drops and catches and tears inside her throat and Dani knows that whatever is coming next isn’t something she wants to hear, it’s not something Jamie wants to say, but she knows it’s coming and she knows she needs to listen.
“I don’t even remember how it happened. I wasn’t paying attention to the road. I wasn’t paying attention to him or his stupid singing or stupid christmas songs on the radio. I was paying attention to myself, my own world, my phone, my problems, my girlfriend at the time, and I wasn’t paying attention to the fact that a deer jumped out and he swerved and hit a telephone pole. The next thing I know, I could taste smoke and flames and I was laying in snow and-- I think I yelled. I yelled for him. And I ran to the truck, laying on it’s hood and I reached my arms into the broken glass and the fire and I grabbed at him and I tried to pull him out. I tried. I yanked and I pulled and I didn’t care that the fire was burning me. I couldn’t feel it. I never felt it. I never felt anything after that.”
Dani knows that if she could see Jamie’s eyes through the dark, she would see sorrow and sadness and she so wants to take that pain away. She can’t though, nobody can, so she leans forward and she presses her lips to Jamie’s cheek, her temple, her jaw - tasting the salt on her skin. She wipes the tears away with her smile, that’s the best she can do. That’s all she can offer.
And when Jamie turns to her, her eyes shining with the unearthed pain, Dani decides maybe Jamie needed saving just as much as Dani did that night in the middle of the road.
“You see, Poppins, Christmas is for people with families. I don’t have any family. I don’t have anybody, really.”
And Dani doesn’t know what makes her say it, doesn’t know what makes her feel bold enough to be here, fully, ready to put this woman back together, but it still feels right when she says,
“You have me.”
And as she leans forward and captures Jamie’s bottom lip between her own, she expects the way her heart leaps into her throat, and she expects the way Jamie flips her onto her back, but what she doesn’t expect is for the power to suddenly jolt back on.
The way the electricity hummed made the day feel real. It made the time that has passed since she walked out on Eddie feel longer, harsher. And the way the numbers next to her text icon would tick up each time she looked down at the screen was beginning to pick at the back of her brain.
Which is how she found herself sitting on the kitchen island, watching Jamie move around the space in front of her, tapping her legs as she passed, Dani’s phone pressed into her ear, while she waited for her mom to pick up the other end.
It rang once, twice, three times and Dani heard the way the pots and pans clanked in the kitchen and she thought about how Jamie’s hands felt wrapped around her waist and she considered hanging up the phone and throwing it out into the snow.
But she remembers the last text from her mom, please just tell me you’re alive, and she thought about Jamie and her story and she couldn’t let more time pass without giving her mother that small comfort.
The phone clicks and her throat swells up when she hears, “Danielle?” Because it’s not her mother. It’s not her mother who answers.
“Eddie.” She brings her fingers up to her eyes and presses in. She can already feel the way her anxiety is bubbling at the surface just with one word from him. Jamie’s energy falters. “Um-- I thought-- I thought I called my mother.”
“You did. I’m here, I’m here with her. We have been so worried, Danielle. We thought-- we called the police.”
“You didn’t need to do that, I’m fine.”
“Danielle,” she grinds her teeth at the way he says her name. It’s been just a handful of days but already she’s become addicted to the way Jamie calls her Dani and the way that feels like home and this, this feels suffocating. “You just left. Nobody heard a word, you were just gone. And then you turned your phone off and we just-- we thought something had happened to you.”
“I didn’t turn it off, it died. The power went out.”
“The power went out where? Where are you?” She can hear the way he shifts the phone in his hands and the way her mother whispers something to him in the background and it occurs to her,
“Eddie take me off speaker phone, please.”
There’s another shuffle of air and his phone is back, more robust and louder this time when he says, “Danielle, tell me where you are.”
She can feel the way Jamie’s carefully moving around her now, keeping wide of her space, and she feels guilty. She feels guilty that she didn’t sort this all out before leaving, before meeting somebody, before falling in love quicker than she could even get out of her wedding dress. She feels guilty about lying to Eddie, to her mom. She feels guilty that she has unfinished business with a forgotten fiance and a half dressed woman making her dinner and no plan as to how to remedy any of this.
“I’m not far. My car broke down and I’ve been staying at a motel. Just needed to clear my head for a couple days.” She bites her lip at the lie. It feels wrong to pretend her life hasn’t changed in a way she can’t turn back from in just a few days. It feels cheap to act like she’s nowhere, doing nothing, around nobody.
“Well, let me come get you. I’m going to come get you.” She hears him turn away from the phone and ask for a pen, ready to write down an address.
She hears Jamie pass behind her, the side door that she was pressed up against just hours before opening and closing with a thud.
“Eddie, no.”
“What do you mean, no? You have to get home.” There’s a question in his voice, an innocence that reminds her that he used to be her best friend. Once upon a time, he knew everything about her.
“That’s not my home anymore, Eddie. I need,” she breathes, thinking, about all that she needs. She needs to be loved, she needs to believe in something, she needs to be free, she needs, “I need more.”
She listens for a moment to nothing. It’s quiet on the other end of the phone, it’s quiet in the kitchen, and she’s caught in the middle.
“Can we meet up to talk about this?” Eddie’s voice is laced with desperation and Dani feels herself cracking.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.” She whispers into the air, resigned and hurting and exhausted.
“I just want you to tell me the truth.” Dani thinks about this, the truth. What the truth is. That she’s gay. That she doesn’t love him, not the way she should. That she thinks she found her soulmate in a grumpy British woman in the middle of the woods. She thinks about these truths and she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know if she can handle so much honesty. “Just come home. Please. And we can talk.”
It’s not long before Jamie comes back into the kitchen. Her mood is twisted and Dani thinks that maybe Jamie needs the whole truth too.
“I think-- I have to go see him.” She says it into her chest, her chin dipped down into the collar of the soft hoodie she grabbed off Jamie’s dresser. It smells like her and Dani wants to wrap herself in it and float into a world where there’s no Eddie, no Judy, no responsibilities or burdens or Jamie with a hard line across her forehead as she washes the dishes in the sink.
“You gotta do what you gotta do.”
Jamie’s shoulders are tight as she scrubs hard against the teflon. Dani watches the way her mouth is pressed in and her lip is between her teeth and she has the same look she had the first night Dani got here.
“I just-- I just ran out without really thinking it through and now I’m here and--” Dani slides off the counter, phone left behind, and settles behind Jamie. She feels the way the girl releases herself into the hold, how she relaxes back into her and how her breath shutters softly.
“Listen, Poppins, you don’t have to explain it to me.” But Jamie’s voice isn’t settled, it’s sad. It’s resigned.
“But I don’t want to go. I-- I want to stay here with you and this little bubble, and play in this pretend world and just-- a break away from him and my responsibilities and my real life. Just tell me to stay.”
Dani takes a step back to let Jamie turn around and face her. She’s hoping to see the something in the blue, sometimes green, eyes that tells her that she’s wanted here. She’s waiting for the words to form on the lips that she can still taste, the words that tell her she’s needed. She’s waiting, she’s waiting, but all she sees is a woman that’s retreated back into her shell. All she sees is a broken heart.
“You can’t play pretend forever, right? Have to get back to what’s real.” Jamie is moving further from her - in distance and in spirit. And Dani feels desperate to grab at the strings that remain.
“That’s not what I meant, Jamie. This is real, it is. It’s--”
Jamie shakes her head, “It’s been three days. It’s been a nice break for you but--”
“Why are you being like this?” There’s frustration coursing through her now. She brings her hands to her face and presses in on her eyes.
“Because you were always going to leave, weren’t you?” Jamie’s voice is louder, harsher, and Dani wraps her arms around herself, curling in. “That was the deal. Once I had you all mended up, I’d send you back out on your way. This was just a little vacation for you, a little break. Just a chance to clear your head.”
Dani wants to yell, she wants to argue and she wants to fight and she wants to do it with this woman. This infuriating, stubborn, beautiful woman. But she thinks she might be the only one. She thinks she might be the only one fighting to hold on to this, whatever this was.
“Tell me to stay, Jamie.” And her fingers are gripped, white knuckled and rough, around the beating in her chest and it hurts. It hurts to think about walking out of here, walking away from something she’s never felt in her entire life.
“Car is all ready to go for you to leave in the morning.”
But it’s terrifying to think that maybe Jamie isn’t ready to catch her.
“So that’s it? Just-- just bye and see ya around?”
Dani feels the sting behind her eyes. She feels the choke in her throat. She feels the seizing of her chest. She feels everything she’s ever felt and it’s all at once and it’s entirely overwhelming and she can’t stomach the way she knows the next words that are coming out of Jamie. She knows it because it’s quiet and it’s broken and it’s like lashes against her body when she hears Jamie mumble under her breath,
“I’ll see ya around, Dani.”
So yeah, in the end, she ran. She ran away from the fight. She ran from herself. She ran back home, back to the place that she never truly felt at peace. She ran from Jamie. She ran and she hoped and she prayed that maybe this time somebody would chase her.