a star in the night sky
It’s funny how the ache in her bones, the pull in her muscles, never seems to go away. When she was younger, she’d always thought of love as something that was finite—expiration date on the horizon, creeping closer with every kiss and touch. Something you grow out of rather than old with.
But it’s a different kind of ache with Dani. A pull forward but not away. Not into the empty future or the lonely present, but into Dani’s warmth and her arms and her acceptance.
Two years and here they are.
It’s more than she could have ever known to ask for.
The first morning in their new apartment—the one they found together—Jamie wakes up to the rosy pink light coming through the uncurtained windows. The only blanket they’d managed to find is loose and messy on top of her body and she sighs. Stretches her arms and legs out. That ache is there—that pull—but there’s another ache, also. A different kind.
Sore muscles. Overworked. Tender from strain or else Dani’s tight grip, her nails digging in.
She stares up at the ceiling for a moment, letting the memories of the night before wash over her. There are boxes stacked around them in precarious towers, and she eyes them fondly—looks at DANI BOOKS and SHEETS JAMIE; their names written in thick marker on the cardboard, labeling the things they’ve brought with them. But there’s something to seeing them mixed together as they are.
Dani’s things with her things and so on and so forth.
When she turns her head, Dani is there, sleeping peacefully. It’s funny how someone who spends her days frantic with a thousand different emotions for every situation can be so still. Her hair is an absolute mess, tangled and ruffled from Jamie’s hands and the friction of the mattress. Her lips are dark pink, kiss-bruised, and there’s a love bite right beneath her collarbone.
Jamie looks her over. Smiles. Takes a deep breath as her heart and stomach do this...thing.
She wants to pull Dani closer, kiss her awake, because she misses hearing her talk, laugh, seeing her smile. And love isn’t just that pull, it’s longing for the person lying in bed beside you just because she isn’t awake yet.
So she settles for carefully scooting closer and kissing the crown of Dani’s head.
A little later, Dani will wake up and hum a good morning and run her fingers through her hair in an attempt to flatten it and Jamie will be too smitten to do anything but grin.
Another day, she thinks.
And how lucky she is for it.
.
“It really isn’t hurting that bad.”
Jamie unlocks the door to their apartment and steps inside, leaving Dani to close it behind them. She doesn’t answer.
“I mean...three stitches isn’t too terrible, right?”
Their half-made dinner is lying out on the counter still, a pot of water on the stove. Jamie takes it off and dumps it in the sink, then begins cleaning up the rest of it all.
“I can still do things at the shop.” Dani comes over and stands on the other side of the island. “I’m fine.”
Jamie turns away from her, taking a cutting board of a mostly-chopped or else bloodily diced onion to the garbage bin. She tosses it out and feels it as Dani steps closer.
“Are you really trying to give me the cold shoulder?”
Finally, Jamie turns and, throwing the cutting board down on the counter, looks up to meet Dani’s eyes. “Yes,” she says, “I am. I’m angry with you, Dani. Witness me being angry.”
She puts her hands on her hips and an image of her mother in the exact same pose—back before she’d left them—comes immediately to mind. Her arms drop back to her sides.
“It was an accident,” Dani defends. “And a little one at that. The doctor said there shouldn’t be any nerve or muscle damage.”
Jamie’s jaw drops open a little in surprise. “As if that makes it all better!” she says, a petulant twinge in her voice. “You might have been seriously hurt.”
“But I wasn’t.” She’s not yelling—no never—but she’s taken on the same tone she used to use with Miles and Flora when they wouldn’t listen. Jamie resists the urge to shrink under it. “I’m fine.”
“That’s not the point,” Jamie says firmly, eyes wild with agitation. “The point is that you weren’t be careful and you hurt yourself and you don’t even care—”
“It was an accident. It’s not like I meant to do it. Look.” She holds up her left hand to show off her heavily bandaged thumb and forefinger as she wiggles them a little. “It’s not even that big a deal.”
Beneath all that wrapping, Jamie knows that the stitches are there holding together the skin that was sliced apart by the knife Dani was using earlier. Jamie had been on pasta duty and was focused on that when she heard Dani’s quiet, “Oh,” followed by the dropping of the knife and—a little more frantically— a louder, “Crap.”
When she’d turned, all she’d seen was the cutting board covered in bright red droplets and Dani pressing paper towels to her hands over the sink. There’d been a lot of blood and Jamie has never been good with blood so, yes. Fine. Maybe she’d overreacted, but after two hours in the emergency room waiting around for someone to sew her girlfriend back together, that reaction still seems justified.
Dani smiles, trying to make the mood a little lighter, but there is still a sharp edge of panic in Jamie’s chest that hasn’t gone away and it’s making it a little hard to breathe.
“I really don’t know why you’re making this such a big deal,” Dani says, and she doesn’t mean it to come out the way it does—like Jamie is being ridiculous for caring—but it stings all the same.
And that’s when Jamie starts crying.
Really crying. Loud sobs and hot tears and her face buried in her hands as she leans back against the counter and tries to catch her breath.
Almost immediately, there are arms around her, pulling her into a tight embrace, rocking her back and forth.
“Oh, Jamie,” Dani whispers against Jamie’s hair. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I-I didn’t mean to...God, I’m such a jerk.”
She presses a kiss to Jamie’s forehead and Jamie wraps her arms around her stomach, curling into Dani’s chest. “No, you’re right. I’m being silly,” she says, her voice cracking a little. “I just...When I saw ya’ standing there like that...and all that blood, I just—I just can’t help imagining what might have happened if it were worse. If…”
In all the time they’ve been together, they haven’t discussed what happened at Bly more than strictly necessary. Those concerns that plagued their every moment at the beginning have fallen to the wayside as they’ve built their life together. But Jamie remembers it—remembers Dani’s worry over how many days they’ll have—and now she can hardly think of anything else.
The next few minutes are filled with Dani’s quiet shushing. Saying, “I’m here,” and, “It’s okay,” while Jamie tries to calm down.
“I’m sorry I’m such a full-time job,” Dani says. “I can’t even...make dinner with you without grievously wounding myself.”
Jamie chuckles wetly against the fabric of Dani’s sweater. “No, you can’t, can you?” she whispers back. “Not sure how you ever got around without me, Poppins.” This gets her a full-on laugh and she grins at the sound, wishing she could hear it forever.
“Me neither,” Dani says. “But you’re here now, right? And so am I. And I’m okay. Temporarily a little less ambidextrous maybe. But okay.”
“You’re a bit of an idiot,” Jamie says without a hint of malice.
“But I’m your idiot,” Dani says and Jamie pulls back enough to tug her in for a kiss.
Dani cups a hand behind Jamie’s neck and deepens it, and Jamie can taste the salt of her own tears, but she just keeps kissing her back.
“I love you,” Dani whispers, pressing the words into Jamie’s lips like she’s trying to make them stay.
Jamie sighs. Kisses Dani again. “I love you, too.”
She’s alive. They both are. And that’s enough, isn’t it?
____________
And it is. It’s enough for so long.
Four years in, Dani kisses her awake on Christmas morning saying, “Come on, I wanna give you your presents,” and Jamie is still half-asleep as she’s dragged to their Christmas tree in the living room. It’s a necklace with a lock on it—the kind they’d seen at a shop a few months back and laughed about for hours after, wondering why any man would think it was a good present for a woman. Dani has the one with the key on it and Jamie kisses her as they laugh, sliding her arms around Dani’s waist and practically pushing her onto the rug.
And then there is that golden afternoon with that silly plant Dani brings home a year later. The Claddagh ring and Dani holding her in a vise grip that Jamie won’t understand until much, much later.
After the proposal—after she says yes, that’s enough, yes yes—and she’s wearing her ring, Dani hovers over her in their bed, looking down at Jamie, one arm pressed to the mattress beside her head, the other hand slipping between her legs. Jamie presses her palms to Dani’s bare shoulder blades and sighs, and Dani smiles, her eyes catching the light of the sun peeking through their curtains.
“I love you,” Jamie tells her, pressing her knees to either side of Dani’s hips. “God, I love you so much.”
And Dani stops smiling. The sun leaves her eyes. In its place are tears. One of them slips free and drips down to land on Jamie’s sternum as Dani leans in and presses her face into Jamie’s neck.
Kisses the skin there. Silently sobbing. Her hand still moving a little.
“Dani,” Jamie whispers, clutching her tighter. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”
After a moment, Dani pulls herself back up and presses their foreheads together, still crying. Jamie cups her face, rubbing the tears away with her thumbs and kissing Dani’s nose, her eyebrow, her chin. Anywhere she can reach.
And she knows the answer. Knows what it is. Feels it too.
That fear. That terror at the thought of losing one another. It’s ever-present, no matter how good Jamie has gotten at talking around it. It’s still there, and she watches as the what-ifs play in Dani’s eyes.
But Dani doesn’t say that exactly. Not at all, really.
She says: “I’m just really...really happy.”
Jamie doesn’t poke. She doesn’t prod. She just smiles, says, “I am, too,” and kisses Dani again and again.
____________
But time moves ever on. It nips at their heels whenever they try to linger, pushing them ever forward.
It goes and goes and with it goes Jamie.
Things are good. They aren’t simple, but they are good.
Dani takes up her every moment, everywhere at once, larger than life with a smile like a sonnet and lips that write love letters everytime they find Jamie’s.
There are photographs around their apartment of the places they’ve gone. New York and California and Paris and Spain. Arms around one another. Grinning with the blue sky spinning over their heads.
Dani is still Dani. She is Jamie’s best friend, her partner, her wife.
They have date nights once a week, so regularly that the staff at all the local restaurants know them by name. Other days, they live domestically. Do laundry together. Cook together. Go to the movies. There are still so many weekends spent in bed, too.
But it slips. More and more each day. If she is Dani one moment, she is her Other the next. And there is still some of Dani inside her Other when this happens, yes, but it is dark and hidden, nothing but the echo of that light.
And yet—
Her smile is still a star in the night sky.
And it stays. At dinners, at New Year’s Party’s, on plane rides and train rides and everywhere they go. Dani here and Dani there and nine years before she cannot ignore the ache, the slice.
Cuts deeper each time. No avoiding it, she thinks. Not in the end.
But it is not the end.
Not yet.
Jamie wakes up in their bed a decade into loving Dani and she is not alone. Dani is lying beside her, hair mussed by fingers and friction. Love bites down her neck. Smiling in her sleep with eyelashes fluttering.
She isn’t surprised anymore by the devotion that runs through her veins, the same devotion that has gripped her all this time.
Dani will wake up soon, like she has every day so far, and there will be morning-breath kisses and breakfast plans scrapped in favor of staying in bed. They will say I love you on the same breath, at the same moment, and laugh at their timing, touching and knowing and remembering and it will be enough.
They will have that moment.
And there is still time for a hundred more like it.
...