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It makes her sad, sometimes, thinking about how people lose touch. About how the natural state of community is to just...gently drift apart, given enough time, given enough space. Even with the best of intentions, it happens. The drift.
Oh, you work at it, for a while. Letters--postcards--the odd phone call, even, a bright-as-sunshine voice on the other end of the country squealing your name in delight. You try. You bear witness from afar to report cards and gold stars, to sports teams tried out for and school plays performed in. You hear the exhaustion in your old boss’ voice as he begs for advice. How do I get her to eat broccoli? How do I convince him to keep at arithmetic when I can’t even keep up? You smile, and you volley back the life you’re leading: the travel, the shop, the ring hidden in a potted plant.
And then, Jamie thinks, you blink. You blink, and eight becomes eighteen. Ten becomes twenty. Children, once hopeful and sweet and scarred by the injustice of grief, become adults. And they don’t even do so before your very eyes. They do it from kilometers off. They do it from another coast entirely.
And then, Jamie thinks, you blink again. You blink, and eighteen becomes two years shy of thirty. Two years shy of the age where au pairs meet gardeners, summer jobs become steady careers, England makes the irrevocable shift to America. You blink, and suddenly you’re fifty years old, and there’s a gold ring on your third finger, and you haven’t seen them in years.
You blink. And the invitation arrives.
“Christ,” she says, turning it over. “Christ, the kid’s getting married.”
“Kid?” Dani looks up from her book, puzzled. “What kid?”
Jamie wordlessly holds it out--a gold-filigreed cardstock, pleasantly heavy in her palm; Henry Wingrave, still sparing no expense. “Flora.”
“Oh,” says Dani, almost blithely. “Yes. Owen mentioned something about that.”
She inspects the card as though this happens every day--wedding invites dropping from the sky to string past to present. Jamie grimaces.
“Know it’s a cliché, to ask where the time goes, but--”
She watches Dani tack the invite to the fridge, settled neatly alongside the fifteen-year-old, sun-bleached card bearing Hannah and Owen’s ceremony information. It’s unfathomable, that so much time could have passed between that day in Paris and now--that Hannah and Owen could be celebrating such a momentous anniversary weeks after Flora slips a ring onto her own finger.
That she and Dani have had ten years of their own--legal, maybe not in the eyes of the American government, but who gives a flying fuck about that?--feels at once insane and incredibly obvious. Jamie hasn’t woken a day since leaving Bly Manor in 1987 feeling as though Dani belongs anywhere else. The truly mad thing, she thinks with a wry little smile, is that it took ten years for one of them (Dani, it was always going to be Dani) to propose.
And that was, she realizes with a jolt, the last time they’d seen Miles and Flora Wingrave in the flesh. At a quiet little ceremony held back in England--it had only felt right, Dani’d said, that they get the family back together where it had been built--using Henry Wingrave’s family home one more time. Privately, Jamie’s not certain they’d go back again, in the event of a legal wedding; Bly might be where she lost her heart, but Vermont is where she and Dani have built a life. She sort of likes the idea of a park wedding in the spring, standing on American soil, knitting via bookend events the halves of their respective pasts into one.
Christ, how old will Miles and Flora be when that day comes? They’d looked ridiculously tall a decade ago--Miles nearly of American voting age, Flora wielding her recent eighteenth birthday like a baton. She’d brought a date, Jamie remembers, a lanky kid with a mop of ginger hair. Probably not the same boy--this Jack--she’s marrying.
“Can’t believe they thought to invite us,” she says, still half-snagged on the memory. “Couple of old people they barely remember.”
“Oh,” Dani scoffs, “they remember.”
“Like a fairy story,” Jamie counters. “The days of yore or what-the-fuck-ever. Not Dani Clayton and Jamie Taylor at all, but the Au Pair and the Gardener. It’s the same for the others, you know. Even Hannah.”
She remembers the slightly puzzled crease between Flora’s brows at their little affair, watching Hannah arrange Dani’s hair. Not as though she’d forgotten Hannah, exactly, but that even the time between weddings had elapsed so completely that Flora could not entirely put her finger on the feelings once so ingrained in her daily life. Hannah Grose: the former housekeeper of Bly Manor, a beautiful woman with a kind smile--not the hands that patched skinned knees, the voice that raised in alarm when Flora attempted once to slide down the long banister. The memories remain, Jamie had thought then, but the life of it fades.
“They still want us there,” Dani says now, leaning across the counter to kiss her cheek. Jamie doesn’t argue. Doesn’t say that these are no longer their kids--as they’d all thought of the children back then, a small army of adults set against the bleakly unfair tide of grief threatening to wash Miles and Flora out to sea--but a pair of legitimate adults.
Henry, she’s sure, is the real reason they’ve been invited. Henry, responsible for the neat penmanship and slightly stilted emails over the years, tucking photos into envelopes to usher them into Miles’ Prom, Flora’s first car, the kids home from school on Christmas holiday. Henry Wingrave, who once couldn’t have been bothered to even visit, now the only thing stitching them all together.
Wonders never cease, she thinks, smiling to herself.
Whatever the reason, whatever the true nature of the invitation, doesn’t much matter. Flora Wingrave is getting married. Flora is getting married at a huge estate in California, and for the first time in ten years, they’re all going to be together.
That, Jamie thinks, is reason enough to hop a plane to anywhere.
***
The flight is brief, compared to so many in their personal travel history; Dani spends the whole thing dozing on her shoulder, weary from a long set of days preparing the shop for their absence. They’ve hired extra help in recent years, but Jamie’s not sure either of them will ever stop thinking of it as solely theirs. Even having trained the fresh-faced twenty-somethings herself, she can’t help cringing whenever someone else reaches for her flowers.
Still, it’s good practice. “We can’t run it morning, noon, and night forever,” Dani has been saying lately. “There’s so much world to see.”
She says it with the casual good humor of a woman who understands the brevity of life--and who, also, has learned to trust the tide. One day at a time, the mantra of their youth, when Dani was still caught up in the memory of a young man and a pair of unrelenting headlights, has expanded. Not simply cherish the time while we have it, but watch those days grow. Watch them fill the space--days and months and years in this apartment, this shop, this country, with hands joined resolutely against whatever may come. One day at a time once felt like a quiet ward against Dani’s fears; now, with rings and oaths and twenty years of sharing the same pillow, it feels like home.
It’s in the card tucked into Dani’s carry-on bag, even--a finale to the missive she’d scrawled in her painstaking hand for Flora and her groom. Don’t think of anything else, she’d written, using words Jamie had offered in the stillness of hotel rooms nearly two decades gone. Not right now. One day at a time. It’s what everyone’s got, when you get down to it.
“This is going to be weird,” Jamie tells her as they settle into a fresh hotel room now. “Seein’ ‘em. Don’t like how tall Miles has gotten, it’s unnerving to have to crane.”
“Miles,” Dani reminds her gently, “has a Master’s degree in child psychology. I think he’ll have some tips to talk you down from unnerving.”
Jamie tosses a hand towel at her, warmth flooding in at the chime of Dani’s laughter.
“Do you think this is all right?” she adds, gesturing down her body. “Brought an actual dress for tomorrow, obviously--”
“No suspenders?” Dani’s eyes glitter. Jamie snorts.
“Christ, two decades of ‘em weren’t enough?”
“Never.” Dani smooths her skirt, tipping her head to take in the green, the belt, the long sleeves. “You look terrific. You always do.”
“Flirt.” Twenty years, she reflects, and Dani looking at her with eyes that wide and honest still lands. Twenty years, and Dani in a black dress--albeit one slightly better suited to the engagement at hand--still knocks her right over the head. “Ask nicely, maybe they’ll make an appearance for the flight home.”
Dani tosses her hair, slipping her arms around Jamie’s waist. “The flight home,” she murmurs, bending to kiss just above her collar, “will be sweatpants and Red Bull, and we both know it.”
“Could blend the two. Make a fine fashion statement.” She’s grinning, hands bunching the dress around Dani’s hips until it rides a little higher. Dani makes an agreeable sound into her throat. “Ah--don’t go distracting, now, we’re meant to be at dinner in...”
“I’m distracting?” Dani doesn’t even bother trying to sound aggrieved. They’ve been doing this dance a long time, both of them patently aware of the other’s inclinations by now. “Whose hand is that on my thigh?”
“I’m helping,” Jamie says innocently. “Just making sure everything is present and--” She slips her hand higher, tracing. Dani sucks in a breath. “Accounted for.”
Dani lets it ride for a moment longer--unable to stop kissing the space just below Jamie’s jaw, no matter her own protests about time--and Jamie smiles. Something about hotel rooms, she thinks--or about the road--or about Dani Clayton in general--seems to strip away the years. Dani’s got lines around her mouth, and her own hair is flirting dangerously with pure silver these days, but in the end, nothing’s really changed. Dani, one hand braced against her face, thumb tracing the seam of her lips, is the exact same woman now as the one who had kissed her senseless in a grove of white blooms.
The same woman--and someone else, entirely, at the same time. Because isn’t that how it goes? The years stack up along the curve of a smile, behind the familiar blue eyes, padded into the tip of each finger. Dani is the same gentle, hard-headed, loving woman she’d met that summer, and she is the business-minded, rather-nervous, surprisingly-silly woman she married ten years ago beside a lake. Twenty years of discovering what stays, discarding what has become obsolete, growing fresh methods of coping with the changing world. Twenty years. One woman.
Could never be enough, she thinks, leaning in to kiss Dani properly. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred. She’ll still be learning who Dani might become, still be relishing the uninhibited way her lips part and her hips rock forward. It is an education, and it is a favorite shirt, and it is home. Everything about Dani has always been that much.
“Okay,” Dani laughs, “okay, really. Owen will kill us if we miss his speech.”
“She let Owen give the speech,” Jamie says, somewhat dazedly--Dani has followed this pronouncement up with eyes flicking to Jamie’s lips and a second kiss so heated, it nearly erases the first from memory. “Can’t believe it.”
“I can.” Dani extricates herself primly, steps back to quickly work her hair into a braid without looking. “He always was her favorite.”
“I was her favorite.” Perching on the edge of the bed, Jamie watches her hands move with hungry eyes. Always making the simplest tasks compelling, Dani Clayton. “She thought I was the coolest, once upon an 80s movie.”
“Well. If you two decide this is the weekend to duke it out for the title, let me know in advance. I’ll have a belt made.”
“Time with me,” Jamie observes, leaning over to recover her boots, “has really made you unbearably cheeky, Poppins, has anyone mentioned?”
***
The dinner is outdoors, populated with sunshine and a dozen faces she doubts she’d recognize even if she had reference. It’s a little off-putting, stepping into the ring, if she’s honest; she’s never been terrifically comfortable with crowds of unknown elements, even with Dani’s gentle hand at her elbow providing some relief. Small, she thinks, is always better. Maybe it’s the age talking. Maybe it’s just who Jamie will always be.
At least there’s Hannah--unchanged by the unflagging engine that is time, save for the fashion of the day--already standing to usher them in. Distance is a trial for any relationship, but the minute Hannah’s arms are around her shoulders, Jamie can’t quite believe they’ve ever been apart.
“Nearly late,” Hannah says, and she can hear the grin in her voice. Jamie leans out of the embrace with a shrug.
“You know my wife. Still can’t keep her hands to herself.”
Hannah raises her eyebrows at Dani. “So, it was her doing, then.”
“Always,” Dani says. Jamie makes a note to repay her for that later--while it may have been her hand teasing beneath Dani’s skirt, they both know who is generally to blame for any instances of tardiness. Namely, the fact that, once set free of all restraint, Dani’s never quite figured out how to bottle her desires again.
Not that anyone ever believes it of her, with the too-pretty girl next door smile, and the sweet demeanor, and that posture which says never have I done a thing wrong in my entire life, just prove me wrong--
“You’re drooling,” Hannah points out into her ear. Jamie gives her head an aggressive shake, rearranging her features into an expression that—she hopes— does not articulate to the class how attracted she still is to this woman after twenty fucking years.
Owen is tapping a glass, clearing his throat. He looks absurdly young without his mustache--a dare, Jamie knows, for charity. The contact lenses are a recent choice (If I kept the glasses, he’d groaned over the phone when she mentioned a Myspace photo, might as well just plaster cola bottles to my eyes. This way, at least I can see without danger of redirecting the sun into an open flame.), and he’s chosen a neat, simple suit. Forsaking bells and whistles, as always, in favor of warm charisma to carry him through.
His speech is precisely what she’d imagined: mainly silly, with pockets of heart, and a heavy dose of lean-in awkwardness designed to make Flora giggle. Though she’s not sure she believes Owen Sharma is Flora’s favorite person from the old days--she’ll never forget a tiny, half-asleep voice striking awestruck notes--she can’t deny he was the man for this particular job. Trying to imagine herself up there instead, fumbling through notecards, is fucking painful.
She’s much happier here, seated with her elbow brushing Hannah’s and her hand settled on Dani’s knee. And, when the time for speeches elapses into the meal, she leans across to say brightly, “Owen, important question. When, exactly, did you start to shrink?”
He scowls, dips two fingers into his water glass, flicks them in her direction. Hannah somehow manages to laugh and telegraph mild reproach at the same time.
“Good to see you both,” Owen adds. “How have we gone so long? Christ, what, five years?”
“Come visit.” Dani spears a potato, pops it into her mouth. “Seriously, you can have our room for the week, we’ll show you around Vermont. Or we can all make a trip to Bar Harbor or something. We miss you.”
The conversation rolls along at a pleasant clip, as unflinching as though no time has passed, and Jamie thinks, This is how it goes. You build your life; they build theirs. The world where you both walk the same streets devolves into weddings and funerals.
There’s a sadness to it, but a comfort, too. They’ve all done so well. Owen’s restaurant thrives between his menu and Hannah’s administrative skills. The shop is top-tier, with Dani planning voyages to Egypt, Belize, Japan for them on the side. Even Henry has come out with a blue ribbon, a better parent than anyone could have dreamed. These kids have been raised well, and lovingly, and now sit here with adult lives of their own.
The kind of unbelievable, Jamie thinks, that only suits real life.
“What’s the story?” she asks when the chatter hits a lull. She subtly jabs a fork toward Flora’s groom-to-be, a somewhat-plain, pleasant-faced man a few years her senior. “How’d that shake out?”
“Dog-walking incident,” a young man across the table answers. It takes her a split second to piece together the deep voice, the almost-shy smile, as matching Miles’ meager social media presence. “She was on her bike. He lost control of a border collie. Rest is...” He makes a small motion with his glass, as if to say, What can you do? “Jack’s a good guy. Well--bit obsessed with basketball, but I’ve never seen her so…Flora.”
Jamie resists the powerful urge to point out how much Miles has grown, how he has gone from rangy teenager to slim, relaxed young man in the blink of an eye. Only old people do that, she reminds herself, though the simple fact of his ludicrous height makes her feel unbearably close to the grave. Instead, she says, “He does right by her, then. No drama?”
“Unless you count making her watch old playoff tapes for his birthday,” Miles confirms. “I’ve a bet with Uncle Henry they’ll have their first kid by next Christmas--”
“Not,” Henry cuts in, “a bet I’ve taken.” He looks the particular kind of pained a man only gets while contemplating a wedding and the possible impregnation of his surrogate daughter in a single beat. Miles laughs.
“Come on. I’ll make a fantastic uncle. Learned from the best, didn’t I?”
“Let us hope, fervently, not.” Henry sinks his water in a single go, flashing a bearded smile toward Dani. “Though I did pick up a few tricks from an expert. Will never be able to thank you enough for those first years, Miss Clayton.”
And just like that, they’re talking about the old days as though they were only last week. Miles reminisces about the colorful language he picked up entirely from Jamie (”Still the only person to ever announce they’d fuckin’ end me on the spot,” he says fondly. She raises her glass in memory, amused when Dani turns a shocked scowl in her direction.), while Hannah and Owen banter about chemistry lessons (”Still on about those bloody gluten atoms, I swear--” “They’re important to a well-rounded dough, love!”). Henry takes it all in with a smile that grows just a little wider with every story, as though the weight of memory is tethering him to home for the first time in ages.
“I still have the dollhouse.”
The laughter breaks, all heads turning. Flora has left her imminent-husband at the head of the table, is now standing with a hand on her brother’s chair. She’s rosy at the cheeks, eyes bright with wine and laughter.
“The dollhouse and all the dolls,” she goes on. “Still have it all. It’s in the spare room of our new place.”
“Did you make one for...?” Jamie nods toward Jack. Flora grins.
“Don’t tell him--it’s going to sound silly, but I’m going to give it to him tomorrow. Wedding present.”
Her voice is, like the rest of her, so adult--but despite her height, her composure, the American accent clipping her words, something at the core of that sentence is still absolutely Flora. The same, and not the same. The product of time’s endless parade.
Jamie aches a little, remembering the girl she’d held close, the one Dani had tucked into bed and Owen had hoisted onto his shoulders and Miles had shrieked was cheating at cards. Flora is still that girl, as Dani is still that young woman, as Miles still carries that little boy somewhere inside. And yet, here they all are. Grown. With lives, and merits, and dreams fulfilled and marched toward.
She thinks, abruptly, of the Blondie shirt tucked into the suitcase for the flight home. How threadbare it is, with holes under the arms and a frayed hem. How she’s thought time and again of pitching it in the bin--or letting Dani transfigure it into a throw pillow--and can’t quite bring herself to let it go. They’re all a little like that, she thinks, unexpected emotion forming a lump in her throat. Function remains, even if form shifts over time.
Still a family, somehow, though scattered from Paris to California to Vermont. Still, when Flora pokes a finger into Miles’ ear--when Hannah hides a chuckle behind her hand at Owen’s consistently-awful puns--when Dani’s hand slides to cover her own on the table--
“I’m glad you made it,” Henry says quietly. Jamie can’t remember the last time she felt this warm.
***
They excuse themselves after a few hours--wine replaced with a fine bourbon, tales of youth replaced with ghost stories Jamie finds she hasn’t much stomach for--on grounds of the elderly need their rest. Flora laughs, hugging them goodnight.
“Oh, don’t say that! You’re just as I remember!”
A pretty lie, Jamie thinks affectionately, the kind you only tell loved ones. In truth, she wouldn’t be surprised to find everything Flora recalls was sparked by the evening’s conversation, the way doors in your mind begin swinging open when a home video is switched on. Still, it’s nice to hear, and when Dani confirms that, yes, she still has her doll--and Jamie’s, too--in a place of prominence at their apartment, Flora’s eyes grow misty.
“See?” Dani tells her in the cab back to the hotel. “The love is still there. Just a little bit faded these days.”
They tumble into bed, slightly buzzed, more than a little exhausted, and Jamie’s surprised to find Dani reaching for her. “Don’t have to,” she begins, “if you’re tired--”
“Knackered,” Dani teases, her hand slipping beneath Jamie’s sleep shirt. Her fake English accent, contrary to all attempts, is getting better all the time, as though she can’t help contorting her voice to match the one she’s been living alongside. Jamie doesn’t have the heart to let her know it’s actually rounded passable in recent years.
“There’s always tomorrow,” Jamie adds, a last half-hearted protest even she isn’t committed to--not with Dani’s thigh between her legs, notching gently into place as it has a thousand times before. She sighs into a kiss, winding a hand around Dani’s fraying braid. “Well. If you’re sure. Who’m I to--”
Dani laughs, and her hands are familiar, tugging Jamie’s shirt up. Her skin is familiar, sliding against the sheets of this strangely-starched bed. Jamie rolls, pinning her gently to the mattress, and maybe it’s the alcohol--maybe the range of stories spanning the night--but she could swear her vision doubles. Her wife is beneath her, a warm flush rising in her cheeks, and her new love is, too. Dani Clayton in a dozen hotel rooms spanning America in 1987, growing less shy with every kiss, emboldened by every sound out of Jamie’s mouth--and Dani Clayton in this Californian bed in 2007, no memory of shyness left to her, gazing up with adoring eyes.
It’s too easy to see both, as she bows her head and lets Dani claim her mouth. Too easy to find those first nights threaded into her kiss, exploratory and hopeful, building on an intimacy she can’t imagine going without. Jamie shuts her eyes, letting the dark room expand around them, letting her hand trace the buttons of a faded pink nightshirt as Dani breathes out against her skin. There is no universe, she thinks--no version of the story--where this is not where Dani belongs. Where a bed could ever be acceptable, without Dani in it.
Maybe it’s the alcohol, or the stories, or the simple warmth they found themselves acclimating to in ‘87 and carrying forward even now. Could be all of the above, she thinks, as Dani sits up and lets the shirt fall from her shoulders. All of the above, a path that was always leading here. The bed rocks gently against the wall, Dani’s hand rising to brace against the headboard as Jamie’s fingers slip beneath the band of her shorts.
It’s the woman she met at Bly, spreading her legs, and the woman she learned to love in hotel beds, reaching an arm around her shoulders, and the woman she married by a lake, digging her nails in. Dani then, and Dani now, knitted together into cresting moans, a gold ring, Jamie’s name painted across her lips.
Always the same. Always a little bit different.
Always Dani.
***
Not two minutes into her morning shower, it becomes clear it’s going to be that kind of day--the kind she’d always thought they’d outgrow, with time. Boredom of a certain kind would set in, she thought as a younger woman, or comfort would drain away the sublime need of it. Settling down isn’t always a bad thing.
Twenty years in, the settle still hasn’t landed. It’s a little bit habit, a little bit steady flame, a whole lot of making up for lost time. Older, they may be; less needy, Jamie is coming to understand, doesn’t entirely suit them. Especially on a trip like this, excitement of travel mingling with the rapture of old friends. It feels like reeling back the years, being here. It feels like starting fresh through a book they’ve already memorized.
She still sort of feels obligated to tease Dani about it, though.
“You,” she says over the water pressure, amused, “didn’t tell me you were planning on trouble today.”
Dani arranges the curtain carefully, as though Jamie could give a good goddamn about water splashing out with her wife sliding in naked to join a hot shower. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Just thought I’d forgotten how to scrub up, then? Thought you’d offer assistance?” She can feel herself grinning--that too-wide, idiot grin Dani’s always brought out in her. The tub isn’t large; it takes Dani barely two steps to cross and lay a scorching hand along her spine. Dani Clayton, as always, making constructive use of whatever space she’s granted.
“It goes quicker, when we share.”
It absolutely does not, though Jamie can’t imagine who would argue the point when Dani eases her back against the tile. There is nothing quick about the way Dani is kissing her just outside of the spray, letting the water crash against her shoulders as her tongue curls around a soft moan. Nothing quick at all about Dani--Christ, it never gets old--soaping up a flannel and running it slowly, calculatingly down her neck--chest—belly, watching Jamie’s face all the while.
“Turn,” Dani says softly, and her whole body seems to sharpen. It’s almost as funny as it is overwhelmingly appealing, giving in to Dani’s quiet instruction; half the reason they’re up so early for an afternoon wedding in the first place is because Dani’s always happiest when she’s got a little control over a timetable. Granted, Jamie had thought control would involve parsing out a complicated hairdo, the painstaking application of makeup, a little exploration of the town while out for breakfast. All the time in the world to do as Dani likes before the clock runs out.
That as she likes involves pinning Jamie neatly to the wall, fitting slickly against her back without so much as an inch of give, wasn’t exactly her plan. Not that she’s complaining, arching back to meet the hot mouth trailing down her neck, along the curve of her shoulder. Not that there’s a goddamn thing to complain about, with one hand holding her steady by the hip and the other—now flannel-free and rinsed clean of suds—setting a slow pace between her legs.
Wasn’t the plan for the morning, she thinks dizzily around the hitch of breath, the inhalation of steam, the precise way Dani keeps applying increasingly-intoxicating friction and then backing off again. Wasn’t the plan, to find herself squirming between warm woman and cool wall, her voice lost beneath the jagged crash of the spray.
“How long,” she hears herself gasp, “are you—gonna keep—fuck, Dani—”
“You’re right,” Dani murmurs into her shoulder. “Busy day. Better hurry.”
The friction increases without warning, three fingers in a merciless drag that catches her breath and spins it short. Her eyes clench shut, forehead thumping lightly against tile. Dani is, she can tell, smiling against her back when she breaks.
“This is not the ideal time,” Jamie points out with legs less than solid beneath her, the last trembles of orgasm still working their way out even as she begins lathering shampoo into Dani’s hair, “for this sort of mood.”
“Always seems to go that way, huh?” There is only the tiniest spark of embarrassment in her voice, knitted into the self-awareness. She’s always like this on big days; somewhere along the first year of their life together, she learned how to channel old anxiety into considerably more enjoyable ambitions. Late for a lot of things, they’ve been over the years; late and happy. There are worse crimes to commit.
It had been a deeply unexpected change, especially for Dani. The day the shop had opened, Jamie’d found herself--nervous, fully-dressed, entirely prepared to pace the apartment for an hour straight--pushed onto a couch by a girlfriend on a truly unpredictable mission. Even in the process of uncermoniously dragging a zipper down, Dani had looked a little punch-drunk, as though she couldn’t believe her own bravado.
(The shamelessness kicked in later. The day they’d gotten married, it was a wonder they hadn’t also gotten caught against the counter in that grand kitchen, Dani’s cries muffled into the cup of Jamie’s palm. It’s among her fondest memories of the entire goddamn day.)
“Don’t tell me you’re nervous to watch someone else get married,” she says now, allowing herself the simple pleasure of watching soap run in rivulets down Dani’s back. Dani laughs.
“It’s not nerves. It’s...I don’t know. Reminds me, I guess.”
“Of that first summer?”
“A little bit, but mostly just...” Dani shrugs, sending droplets everywhere. She leans her head back, letting Jamie hold her up as the water coaxes the suds from her hair. “Just that we’re here. Together. And someone we love is about to get started on the same kind of life. It’s invigorating, isn’t it?”
It’s a good word. Big, expansive word: invigorating. It suits the way Dani looks, shutting off the shower, dragging a towel over pink skin. Suits, too, the way Dani only grins when Jamie eases her onto the side of the tub and uses that towel to cushion her knees. Invigorating--it’s a perfect word for the way Dani’s fingers curl into her hair, her heartbeat pounding against Jamie’s lips as she buries her face in Dani’s neck and her fingers between Dani’s still-dripping thighs.
That’ll do it, she thinks--at least for the remnants of the day ahead. Once in the shower, once after. They’re older than they once were, less spry. Twice ‘round will be more than enough to sate Dani’s appetite for the--
She’s on her back on the bed before she can pull on more than underwear, her eyes wide. “It’s past nine already,” she points out. Dani’s knees dig into the bed on either side of her head. Dani grips the headboard with one hand, her body held carefully aloft. Dani doesn’t look like the time matters to her at all.
“Uh huh. We’ve got hours.”
“Thought you needed hours.” She licks her lips, torn between amusement and utter distraction when Dani shifts her hips forward and tilts her head. “For gettin’ pretty. Prettier. Wedding-pretty.”
“Not that many. But if you’d rather I--” This, punctuated by a half-hearted gesture toward the edge of the bed, one leg losing contact with the mattress for all of a second before Jamie hikes it back into place. “We could spend it walking around, if you’d prefer. See the sights.”
“Like this one.” Her hands fold comfortably around the backs of Dani’s thighs, pushing gently wider. She wants to laugh; the audacity of Dani Clayton has truly jumped some bounds since she’d looked almost sheepish in a hallway, trying to discover the magic words needed to make Jamie stay another night.
(If you’d kept trying, Jamie told her two weeks later. If you’d kissed me like that again, held on any tighter, I’d have given in.)
Dani’s found those magic words by now--ones Jamie had held close to her heart, and ones even she hadn’t known would work, and some they’ve invented in a language all their own in the ensuing years. She’s found all the right buttons, all the ways Jamie likes to be touched, needs to be held, craves in the deepest corners of her heart to be loved. Dani has found just about everything, since it started, and still she shows no interest in giving up the search.
It’s hard not to match her stroke for stroke, when she gets like this. Hard not to be swept away on that same vivacious joy, as Dani arches her back, shakes out her wet hair, meets Jamie’s eyes with a look that says she is still delighting in her own courage as she sinks slowly down.
And rightly fucking so. There was a time when the idea of Dani riding her mouth this way, sighing as a practiced tongue greets her with enthusiasm, would be unthinkable. It’s still easy enough, recalling those days: Dani worrying she’d get it wrong--or ask for too much--or otherwise snap the newly formed thing they’d been watching grow with astonished eyes. Dani had thought it was brittle, back then, fragile. She hadn’t realized that every time she allowed herself to beg, every chance she took on discovering something new about them both, every time she let herself laugh in bed when taken by surprise was a faster track to falling in love with her.
Falling, and falling, and still to this day finding there’s more ground to cover. Even the simplest things--the steady thud of the bed against the wall, the less-steady sharpening of Dani’s voice, the way she already tastes a little less clean, a little more her--only add more stones to a foundation that spans whole cities.
There is a clock on the nightstand, and a watch on Dani’s wrist, and a timetable to the day. With Dani spread open for her, soaking her tongue, she doesn’t much care. We’re here. Together. It’s invigorating. It’s Dani’s fingers splayed beneath the framed floral painting on the wall, and Dani struggling to spur a quicker rhythm with every drive of her hips, and Dani’s head bent to watch her work. It’s knowing the sheets still smell of last night, and her underwear is already useless, and she will have the memory of Dani hot on her tongue for the rest of the morning.
“Okay,” she pants, as Dani shakily dismounts and settles beside her on the pillows. “Okay, we have to get dressed. And eat something. Else,” she adds when Dani shoots her a smile that instantly drains the strength from her legs. “Christ, you’re insatiable.”
Dani does not dignify this with a response beyond a hot, sloppy kiss intended to taste herself smeared across Jamie’s lips. She feels her eyes roll back, her hips tilting toward the trace of shameless fingertips. That clock, she recognizes, is going to run out much faster than anticipated if they keep this up. And yet: is there actually a better way to kick off a wedding?
One more. No harm--.
“Okay,” she repeats hoarsely when Dani finally relents. She’s laughing, her voice shaky. “Okay, if you don’t want to have to carry me into the goddamn place, a break. And food. And--”
“A shirt?” Dani asks innocently, holding last night’s discarded t-shirt up. Jamie leans back, an arm behind her head, straining to catch her breath.
“What, and spoil this view?”
“Hey,” she adds when room service has been both ordered and consumed, her dress is safely on, and Dani has politely zipped her up without instigating yet more sex. “You didn’t try anything at Owen and Hannah’s wedding.”
Dani--in a dress that brilliantly brings out her eyes and shoulders in equal measure--hums as she selects a pair of earrings. “Didn’t think you’d be interested.”
“You’re serious?” She can’t keep the note of disbelief from her voice. “Not interested? Me? In you?”
Dani flashes her a grin. “I’m joking, Jamie. We were meant to keep an eye on the kids, remember? Didn’t want one of them falling out of a tree because I couldn’t stay out of your pants.”
Jamie expects her to carry on with this entirely-welcome inability to control herself now that she’s replenished some strength, but Dani seems to have at least momentarily found peace. She finishes readying herself in the bathroom, Jamie applying makeup in the main room’s mirror, as though the only fixation all morning has been to look presentable.
“Would never guess, to look at you,” Jamie murmurs into her ear on the cab over, “that you’d had two orgasms before breakfast.”
“Three,” Dani replies without even the most minute blush. “Again when you did. That noise you make should be bottled.”
***
The wedding is more elaborate than anything she’d prefer while being considerably more understated than Wingrave’s pocketbook would allow. Jamie wonders how much Flora had to talk him down--if Henry’s guilt and grief over his late brother’s inability to be here today might have inspired some opulence not particularly well-suited to young women who keep hold of their childhood dollhouses.
Elaborate, sure, but gorgeous all the same. Henry stands on Flora’s left, Miles on her right, walking her down the aisle in perfect tandem. Miles pretends he isn’t crying the whole way, and Jamie’s grateful for waterproof mascara.
“Always said,” she mumbles, a bit gruffly, “I was a crier.” Dani hands her a tissue, grinning through wet eyes, and kisses the side of her head.
They lose track of Owen when the ceremony breaks on the swell of some heartbreakingly lovely Celine Dion song Jamie has tried for ten years to get sick of. He has insisted on making the cake, a feat Hannah assures them all he took painfully seriously (”Could do it in his sleep, that man,” she says with a particularly tender smile. “Still went through four iterations, didn’t we?”). In his absence, Hannah loops a hand through Jamie’s bent elbow, Dani settling in against her other side, all three armed with champagne in crystal flutes.
“Bit much,” Jamie concedes, though she can’t remember the last time she felt quite this happy. Hannah takes an idle sip, careful of her lipstick.
“Look at her, though. Could you have imagined, watching her run that summer?”
“No,” Jamie says as Dani replies, “Yes.” They squint at one another, eyes crinkling in amusement. Hannah laughs.
“And here I thought Jamie was the romantic in the family.”
Pathologically, Jamie thinks. Even just the act of standing here, gazing around at the tables and lights and flowers feels too good to be true. Knowing she’s been here for friends, for herself, and now for the kid sister she’d never had--it’s too much joy. Too much sunshine to be allowed.
There’s Henry, beaming beneath his snowy beard. There’s Miles, leaning against a table, watching Owen arrange the multi-tiered art installation he calls a cake. And here are her wife and her dearest friend, pressed in close, as warm as you could want.
Unexpected, maybe. Better than the universe generally arranges for, certainly. She’d thought once that fifty would be a sad age--a weary midway point at which the race truly begins taking its toll. You feel fifty, she’s found, in ways twenty and thirty and even forty hadn’t landed. You feel it in your knees, in the joints of your knuckles, in every heartbeat while the world lays dark and quiet around you at night. Who had her mother been, at fifty? Jamie never got to find out.
Not this happy. Of that, she’s sure. It’s a sorry kind of certainty; she wishes she could say better for the woman who failed to raise her, or the man that woman had left behind, or the brothers lost four decades ago to a foster system. Fifty, looking back on all of that, had seemed sad--and a little dangerous, too.
Doesn’t feel dangerous now. Dani Clayton at fifty is the same--and not the same--a brilliant melding of the two. Hannah Grose has surpassed that number by some measure--Jamie’s never quite dared to ask--and seems as vibrant as ever. There are no stopped clocks here, but all the same, if Jamie tilts her head and squints, she thinks she can coax forth that strange doubling trick again. Hannah then, in gold earrings and a tartan skirt, teasing; Hannah now, in gold earrings and a plum gown, laughing. Owen, tall and mustachioed, with those thick glasses hiding none of his delight; Owen, clean-shaven and just a little hunched at the shoulders, a wedding band gleaming on his finger.
It would work for the kids, too, she thinks--if she tried. If she really wanted, she could tip her head and find the ten-year-old boy in Miles’ loose-limbed frame. She could find the lost blue eyes, the bashful little grin. And Flora...so small, she’d felt like nothing at all as Jamie lifted her into the air. Flora, tiny and buoyed by childish optimism. Innocent as anyone could be, with a childhood like hers.
She doesn’t want to, she finds. Or, maybe more accurately, doesn’t need to. With the kids, it’s fine to just look at them now, to drink them in as the grown, steady versions they’ve become. Miles, who cares so hard for the children he helps, he can’t help that care etching into the lines of his palms, the sweep of his smile. Flora, who once seemed so small, now bursting through the doors with her husband’s hand in a firm grip, filling the entire ballroom with her jubilation.
“They did all right, didn’t they?” She’s not sure who she’s asking. Dani smiles as Flora raises joined hands above her head.
“Think it’s a perfect middle.”
“Middle?” Jamie raises an eyebrow. “Not a happy ending?”
“No such thing.” Dani leans in, brushes a brief kiss against her cheek. “Only happy middles that go on and on. Long as you can stand it.”
“Sounds like wisdom. Who taught you that one?” She knocks her hip sideways, pleased when Dani doesn’t so much as stumble. She is, as she has been for years and years, ready for Jamie.
“Oh, a terribly clever woman, ages ago. If only I could recall her name--”
“I say this with all the love,” Hannah interjects dryly. “You really must get a room.”
She kisses them both, a peck on each cheek (”Getting rather French in our glorious age, aren’t we?” Jamie drawls, unable to entirely hide her pleasure), and saunters off in search of her husband.
“You know,” Dani says, finishing her champagne and allowing a passing server to liberate the empty flute, “I didn’t think I could love this much. I mean, there was a time I didn’t think I had the space. Or that I could be brave enough.”
It isn’t the first time she’s said something like this over the years, but for once, she sounds utterly at home in the words. There is no sign of regret, no edge of old guilt. She is simply stating facts.
“I think that’s family,” Jamie says. “Real family. Sometimes it has to be the kind you choose.”
“Twenty years, and I can’t imagine choosing another.” They’re watching Flora wrap her arms around Miles, burying her face in his shoulder. Two kids who survived so much by the time that summer rolled around, walking around now like they’ve only known love. “I miss it, sometimes. Bly. The house, the way we’d all move around like...stars in orbit.”
If Jamie were drunker, she might find herself maudlin here--might wax poetic about stars, and how they are visible from so much further away than you’d think. About how starlight can reach a person from ages off, even after the star itself has burnt out.
She isn’t quite that drunk. The afternoon is still pleasantly hanging on. Flora is giggling, a hand over her mouth, as her beaming husband says something to Owen Jamie would bet her shop qualifies as a shit pun. There is no room for burnt-out star talk here, not today.
“C’mon,” Dani says, taking her by the hand. “I think I see our table.”
***
There are toasts--Henry’s voice remains surprisingly steady; Miles tells stories from Flora’s college days Jamie’s never heard before, both scathing and brimming over with good humor--and dinner is, unsurprisingly, perfect. Owen mumbles once or twice about intercontinental catering, then finds himself enamored with his steak to such a degree, Hannah wonders aloud if he’ll be inviting it back to their room.
Through it all, even offering her food the appreciation it so richly deserves, Jamie finds her attention split neatly down the middle. Half of her is watching Flora at the head table, too distracted by talk and openly gazing at her husband to eat much. Jamie files away this observation, as she had when Hannah and Owen had done much the same at their own party, reminding herself to scrounge a roll or two for Flora later on.
The other half is fixed neatly on Dani.
This wouldn’t be half as joyful an occasion without her, she keeps thinking. Dani isn’t even doing anything particularly special, mostly just laughing at Owen and keeping one hand on Jamie’s thigh under the table, and still, she can’t shake the idea. It would be so wrong, without Dani. Her whole life would be.
“I’m going to marry you again,” she says when a lull strikes, Owen and Hannah moseying over to chat with Henry. She places her lips nearly against Dani’s ear to say it, watching her breath stir the fine hairs which have slipped from Dani’s pinned-up styling. Dani shivers.
“We’re already--”
“Properly,” Jamie says. “Minute we can. I’m gonna marry you again, and we’re gonna have one more of these things. Can be little or a goddamned circus--up to you--and I don’t care if we’re ninety-three when we do it. But I want to...the right way.”
She’s staring at Dani, she realizes, with an intensity that surprises even herself. Her hand grips Dani’s fingers, the bump of ring on ring reassuring. Dani leans in, lets her forehead rest gently against Jamie’s, as though they are not currently in the middle of a packed wedding hall. As though they’re in their own apartment, in their own bed, in a world built solely for two.
“This is the right way,” she says quietly, pulling Jamie’s hand until she can press her mouth to bent knuckles. She lingers against the gold, the texture at the hands and crown worn away from a decade of fidgeting. “I married you beside a lake. And then we signed that paper, when we could. And even if it’s just civil, it’s ours.”
“But--”
“I will,” Dani goes on in that same patient voice, the one that belies the fire in her eyes, “marry you again, if you want to. But as far as I’m concerned, what we’ve done? It’s enough. It’s always been enough for me.”
Closing her eyes, Jamie breathes in the scent of her--the bright clean quality of shampoo, the heavy addition of hairspray, the muted reminder of the morning’s activities mostly buried beneath toothpaste and lipstick and alcohol. Two people who met by complete idiot chance. Two people needing something they hadn’t even known they could accept, until it walked into the same kitchen. Two people linked by rings, by their friends beaming beneath an English sunset, by the decision to choose, and choose, and keep choosing one day at a time.
It’s too big, and it could never be big enough for words, and Jamie realizes she’s grinning even as her eyes are filling.
“Hundred times. I’d marry you a hundred times, if it came down to it.”
“Any amount,” Dani repeats, “is enough for me.”
***
Her attention tapers to a fine point after that, pinned entirely on Dani. The way Dani pushes her chair closer, allowing the foot she’s slipped from her shoe to press against Jamie’s ankle. The way Dani’s head leans back as she laughs. The way Dani looks, walking away from the table in search of a server to replenish their water.
That, especially.
“Drooling,” Hannah intones a second time, sailing past with a plate of cake in each hand. Jamie briefly weighs the merits of lobbing half a roll at her back, but by the time she can settle her nerve, Hannah’s already gone.
Anyway, she wasn’t wrong.
“Do you think,” she asks when Dani sinks back into her seat, “anyone would notice if we, ah. Took a walk?”
“How long a walk?” Dani’s eyes are serious, but her mouth is starting to pull in a half-smile that will, in the fullness of seconds, resemble a particularly shit-eating grin in a greenhouse. Jamie feigns a shrug.
“How long d’you reckon ‘til first dance?”
Dani hesitates, glancing toward the head table. Dessert is just beginning to truly strike, some people still working on the last of their meals. Elaborate, wealthy weddings, Jamie is coming to realize, go on a lot longer than found-family backyard ones.
“Half an hour,” Jamie decides. “Right?”
“At least.” Dani bites her lip. The grin is still winning out. Some things, thank fuck, simply never change.
“Right.” She’s on her feet, hand extended; when Dani takes it, it feels like the first time. It feels like leading the way to a grove of patient moonflowers. It feels like then, like now, stitched into a single tapestry. “C’mon.”
The restroom is orderly to a nearly surgical degree, complete with a loveseat Jamie had found completely preposterous when last she’d visited, and would be absolutely perfect--if not for the clump of women who seem to be exchanging a year’s worth of gossip right where Dani ought to be sprawled. Jamie frowns.
“Bathroom’s out.”
Out back, too, is crossed off the list. Several of Flora’s friends from the rehearsal dinner wave to them, one holding out a lit joint, its cherry burning bright against the onrushing dusk. Jamie shakes her head, visions of taking Dani against a wall rapidly dissipating.
“Right. There has to be somewhere.”
Dani’s laughing as they run, darting through the halls of this old, supposedly-haunted house, and though a mix of frustration and desire are working through her system, Jamie can’t help but join her. There is no faster path back to youth, she thinks, than reliving this--the tireless drive to find somewhere to yourself, if only for a few minutes, in an enormous house somehow too crowded for functioning.
“Memories,” Dani says fondly, as Jamie hikes open the next door they come to and gestures. One of Dani’s eyebrows slowly rises. “Well. The shape of a memory, maybe.”
“Only because Bly didn’t have big enough fucking closets.”
“Oh, they were fairly sizable.” Twenty years is evidently long enough to turn the shade of panic to wry amusement. Jamie winces.
“Your point is well made. Still--it’s this, or hold off until we get back to--”
“Oh, we’re doing this now,” Dani says pleasantly, pressing her backward into the supply closet and letting the door click shut behind them. “If it locks, it’ll be on you to keep me sufficiently distracted until we’re rescued.”
It is wrong, probably, to wish for a jammed lock. Jamie grins.
“Makes you feel like a kid again, doesn’t it?” She angles in, pleased when Dani obediently leans back against the wall. “Sneaking around, like we don’t have a bed of our very own.”
“Our bed is across the country.” Dani manages to sound incredibly reasonable, even reeling her in by the collar. Dani always manages to sound reasonable as they’re starting a thing like this, just as she had this morning. Her why not energy is infectious, the exact same vitality that had once spun a globe and settled on England for no reason other than to get away.
Jamie almost wants her to keep talking--many an engaging afternoon has been spent with Dani trying valiantly to speak clearly around heady distraction--but when Dani kisses her, the thought goes out the proverbial window. All thought, in fact, is rapidly disappearing, replaced by a restless need too big for the handful of hours since the morning and the hotel room.
Dani’s back is against the wall, the angle of her posture stripping an inch or two of height she can’t afford to lose, and yet it is abundantly clear from the jump that Dani is still in control. She’s done a fine job of pretending for the whole wedding not to be thrumming with this exact kind of energy. Pretending. Fascinating, how she still manages it to a degree that convinces even Jamie sometimes.
It all strips away in this closet. Dani is kissing her like a woman who has only just been gifted the opportunity, as Dani has kissed her for years; it is unexpectedly vibrant, and it is coming home after a long time away, and it is tumbling into Wonderland without a second thought. Dani, with her back propped against the wall and her hands gripping the shoulders of Jamie’s dress with a vengeance, nips at her lower lip, licks into her mouth, makes a sound like giddy laughter when she pushes back.
“Supposed to be quick,” she breathes, pushing hard at Jamie’s shoulders. She can’t seem to make up her mind; even as she’s applying pressure to urge Jamie down, she’s dragging her into another kiss, clumsy and hungry in equal measure. Jamie rocks against her, gripping her by the hips, sliding her dress up to the waist in a single decisive jerk.
“Best decide if you want me up here or not, or we’re gonna run out of--”
She grinds her hips hard to punctuate the point. Dani’s eyes flicker shut, a delirious moan muffled against the hand Jamie instinctively moves over her mouth.
“Choose,” Jamie instructs softly. Dani’s hands grasp for her shoulders again, pushing relentlessly down until she obediently folds.
Another time, she’d tease Dani for it, pretending to wonder how Dani could possibly want her this way again today. Another time, with endless hours to spare, she’d string Dani happily along for a little while--refusing to bend, refusing to kneel, indulging herself in pulling Dani’s dress aside to lick at her clavicle, bite at her neck, one hand palming into the bodice until Dani squirms. Another time, she’d make thirty minutes last for three hours, until Dani’s promising through choked whines that she’ll be paying for her fun with interest before long.
Later--maybe back at the hotel tonight. Now, a thrill spikes through her at the pressure of Dani’s hands, at the way Dani looks at her when she gives no resistance at all. There’s a particular shadow to Dani’s eyes, watching her sink, that is perhaps the most agreeable sight yet in a day bursting with pleasant moments.
It’s pride, Jamie is pretty sure. Pride, and trust, and that shining love Dani has never even tried to hide away from her.
Ironically, only that combination possesses the power to urge them into a closet while the rest of the wedding finishes dessert. Only that exact combination could have Jamie bent this way, hands making short work of damp underwear--black lace, she registers with a beat of irrepressible warmth--warring with the desire to hear Dani and the awareness that this is not the time for vocal exercises.
She glances up, amused. “Think you can be quiet?”
Dani pretends to scoff, but she’s already shivering from the gentle curl of Jamie’s hands around her calves. When one slides higher, tracing the muscle of her inner thigh, she places one hand resolutely over her own mouth and settles the other at the crown of Jamie’s head.
This morning had been playful--both in the shower and in bed, Dani had felt like she was gearing up for a big day by putting them both in the best possible mood. Here, back curved off the wall, skirt held aloft by Jamie’s hand pressing it in a crumple against her stomach, there is nothing playful at all about the way she moves. There’s a desperate urgency to her rhythm, setting rather than following Jamie’s lead. It’s commanding, the way she pushes into Jamie’s mouth.
It’s making short work of Jamie’s plan. Her intent had been a halfway marker between the slow tease of her preference and the reckless teenage grind of being in a half-public location. Now, with Dani’s fingers wrenching into her hair, Dani suppressing breathy cries into the skin of her own wrist, she finds herself once more losing track of anything that could remotely be called a plan.
Time is blurring again. She is here, twenty years in and not remotely satisfied, and she is there, twenty years younger, pulling Dani’s legs over her shoulders in a motel room. She is here, knees cushioned by soft carpet, and she is there, listening for only the second or third time in her life to what Dani sounds like as she comes completely undone. She is here, one hand holding a dress, the other two fingers deep, and she is there, memorizing the salt-slick taste, the bunch of Dani’s muscles under her hands, the tremble rising up her thighs as she rocks closer to the edge.
It is the same, wrapping her mouth lovingly around Dani here, and it is so different from the way she’d experimented then--soft licks, then rough, then soft again until Dani made a sound like she was going out of her mind. The hand at the back of her head is relentless, Dani trying to shift her legs further apart. She knows Dani now--knows her body, her habits, her needs like a favorite record played to devastation--and every second of this is the culmination of twenty years’ loving. Every curl of her fingers, every soft moan sunk into Dani’s skin, every flick of tongue and curve of lips--here, when Dani’s hips are slowing, when a sudden shift in intensity will pull the breath from Dani’s lungs in a sharp sweet rush--is a love letter to twenty years.
Marry you again, she thinks with almost feral pleasure, opening her eyes to watch Dani’s hand fall from her lips, Dani’s mouth falling open in a nearly-silent cry. This is how it should be: Dani gripping her hair so hard it stings, Dani whispering one of those magic spells in a reckless chant (yes, Jamie, there, there, there, Jamie, fuck) like it’s the first time, and the last time, and every time in between. This is how it should be: Dani’s hips stuttering, Dani’s inner thighs streaked with lipstick, Dani stepping out of ruined underwear with a rueful expression that only sharpens when Jamie thoughtfully tucks them into the small handbag Dani has left discarded on the closet floor.
Dani looks at her for a long moment, held up only by the wall, as Jamie straightens up and wipes at her mouth with a spare tissue from the purse. It is the expression of a woman who still, to this day, does not entirely feel worthy of starlight.
“Lipstick’s a lost cause, I imagine,” she says, just to watch Dani’s face. "Right. Should get back, before we’re missed.”
Dani makes a protesting little noise, reeling her in for a kiss. “Little longer?”
Jamie hesitates, listening. “’Fraid not. I hear music.”
“Me too,” Dani mutters, and it takes everything in Jamie to reach past her and twist the doorknob.
Anything else, she reasons, and they won’t be making it back to the dance floor until last call.
***
Hannah raises her eyebrows appraisingly when they reappear--noting, Jamie’s certain, the mess she’s made of her lipstick, the marks Dani left on her own wrist, the tangle that Jamie’s hair has become in the span of thirty or so minutes. She’s too good to say anything, but her smile speaks volumes Jamie remembers entirely too well from that very first night, coming around the corner after dinner to ask if Hannah wouldn’t mind watching the kids for a few hours.
(”Interesting plans, have we?”
“Just--she deserves a night off.”
“Mm. Yes, I think deserve is the word for multiple parties here.”)
“Don’t,” she says now, grinning. Hannah raises both hands into the air, pantomiming zipping her lips. “We miss anything good?”
“The bride is freshening up, and then it’s--”
“Time to boogie!” Owen fills in happily. “Hey, where’ve you been? Saved you both some cake. Not that you’re required, but do bear in mind, if you don’t at least try the frosting, it will break my tender heart.”
Jamie glances at the cake, slipping somewhat sideways on its plate. “On one condition.” Like she’d ever turn down Owen Sharma’s baking. “Never greet me with the word boogie again.”
“No promises can be made,” he says soberly. She tries it anyway. “Go on. Needs more...?”
“For once,” she assures him, “it’s absolutely perfect.”
Flora dances, letting her husband twirl her around and around, and her laughter sweeps through the room like a spring rain. Hers is the kind of joy a person, if terribly lucky, only finds a handful of times in life. Jamie hopes Flora will be luckier than most. Hopes the way she looks now--tipped back by this man she so clearly adores, arms looped around his shoulders--is only the prologue to a story that will find happy chapter chasing happy chapter, dozens and dozens of moments exactly as clean as this one. It’s easy enough to imagine a fairytale for her; Jamie barely has to try.
“Suits her,” Dani says against her ear. Her arms are around Jamie’s middle, her body pressed close, swaying from side to side in time with the music. On the dance floor, Henry is stepping in as the song slides seamlessly into a slower tempo. “God, he did a great job.”
Jamie’d be the first to admit she hadn’t expected Henry Wingrave to grow into his role as stand-in parent--but now, watching the relaxed way he spins with Flora in that white dress, she can’t deny there’s nothing stand-in about it. He really does love those kids like his own, and Flora’s smile as she reaches to wipe a tear from his cheek says it all.
“You’re misty,” Dani adds. Jamie sees no point pretending otherwise.
“Lot of big feelings. That Wingrave’s all grown up, for one.”
They all have, she thinks as the song changes again--a fast-and-loose 90s pop song she most vibrantly recalls from dancing with Dani in their kitchen--and the floor slowly floods with bodies. Miles is caught between Owen and Hannah, grimacing as they bump him from one to the other; Flora catches sight and all but leaps onto his back, singing joyfully-incorrect Ricky Martin lyrics at the top of her voice.
Jamie sidles out, hand braced in Dani’s, and digs a gentle elbow into Jack’s ribs. “Gonna be a lot of that in your future, you know.”
He gives her a startled look--this tiny Englishwoman with vaguely chaotic hair and a knowing smile--and she’s gratified to see a bit of fear in his eyes. Just a tiny dose, she thinks, is always wise, when you come to these things fresh. Healthy. It’ll pass soon enough.
“Welcome to the family,” Dani adds. She points to where Flora is now trying valiantly to plant a sloppy kiss on her brother’s cheek. Miles looks ready to sprint for the door. “Rescue your new brother-in-law, will you?”
Jamie only planned, really, for an hour or so of dancing. Old feet, she reasons, and old backs, and old feelings swelling up to exhaust--it’s all a lot for a woman to manage, even if that woman hadn’t recently spent too short a glorious time fumbling with her wife in a closet. And yet, the songs are bleeding one into the next, and Owen’s raising a toast midway through the Macarena, and Miles is surprisingly deft on his feet with a couple of drinks in him. Even Henry is dancing, though his style is a little less rhythmic, a little more inclined toward a stodgy mostly-on-beat nod.
And Dani. Dani doesn’t leave the floor once, save to fetch them water, and Jamie finds herself unable to pull away. There had been remarkably little dancing at their own wedding; they’d settled instead for drinks around a bonfire, for cards at the kitchen table, for a long night of sprawling conversation. It had suited a wedding at the manor, and it had suited them--the quiet certainty tethering one to the other, the steadfast devotion in the face of laws which have not yet bent the knee--but she wonders now if they didn’t miss out. Dani in motion is a revelation, her hair tumbling free of its pins as she runs her hands through it. She takes Flora by the hands, Hannah by the shoulders, tries in vain to spin Owen like a redwood-sized ballerina, and all the while, she is looking at Jamie. Grinning at Jamie. Beckoning Jamie closer.
Some things in this world, she thinks, letting her arms encircle Dani’s neck as the next slow song begins, you simply don’t fight. Some kinds of gravity are a relief to collapse into.
“You having fun?” Dani nuzzles against her hair. Buzzed on wine and dance, she seems unconcerned with the path her hands are tracing along the small of Jamie’s back, up and down the fabric of her dress in slow strokes. Jamie digs the nails of one hand gently into the back of her neck.
“How you think either of us is going to be walking tomorrow--"
“Not doing anything.” Jamie doesn’t buy it for an instant, not with the way Dani’s eyes sparkle. Over her shoulder, she sees Hannah with her face pressed to Owen’s neck, mouthing, Get a room.
“Tell that to Hannah.”
“Hannah,” Dani replies without glancing over, “has her hand on her husband’s butt at the moment, so I don’t think she’s got room to talk.”
Jamie about snaps her neck craning to check. Sure enough-- “Christ, woman, think of the children!”
She’s somehow terribly unsurprised when Flora sails over seconds later to announce the next song comes with a game she’s just invented called All Hands On Butts. Her husband turns a particularly impressive shade of brick, which Jamie would absolutely use to induct him properly to the family--if not for the awareness of her own scorching ears when Dani gamely plants her hands and squeezes.
“This is,” she says through an uncontrollable wave of laughter, “the most undignified we have ever been in public.”
“Not true,” Owen announces. “If I may turn your attention to the time you all christened my new restaurant with a food fight--”
“It was a ceremonial event.”
“It was great fun,” Flora chimes in. Her hands are still positioned squarely on the seat of Jack’s trousers, her cheeks flushed with delight. Her accent, Jamie notes, slips just a little bit back toward the UK when she’s been drinking. “We should do it again. Maybe for your anniversary?”
Jamie watches them banter with eyes that have always seen just a little bit more than anyone realizes. The mark of one built to seek out the signs of rot--the success of a seedling--the imminent bloom of carefully-tended flowers. She sees just a little bit more, files it away, a story she’s been quietly cultivating for twenty years, and she can’t help reflecting on how it all happens.
You blink. You blink, and eight becomes eighteen becomes twenty-eight with a diamond on her finger. You blink, and ten becomes twenty becomes thirty with a degree on his wall. You blink, and children grow up--friends move across the world--a family scatters like stardust.
And then you blink again: and here they all are. Back in one place, for weddings and funerals and ceremonial food fights. You blink, and though your address is in Vermont, a little part of your home will fly back to France tomorrow--and another will stay put in California--and maybe a third will move back to a great, good place in the country, someday. Impossible to say. Impossible to guess. A blink could lead anywhere.
The real trick, she thinks as Dani kisses her with no care at all for the eyes of strangers--Flora is pumping a gleeful fist, Miles laughing, Henry looking fondly over them all as though unable to believe his luck--is to forget about the blink. To shut it off, that impulse to look to tomorrow and next week and next year. The trick is to stop wondering who’s going to move, if these not-quite-kids will have children of their own, when they’ll all be together again next.
They’re here tonight, dancing out the last of the DJ’s setlist, and then she’ll be in a cab with Dani’s hands wandering up her skirt, and in a bed with Dani laughing deliriously into her mouth, and--nothing else matters. Not yet. You don’t think about it until you have to, all those sad bits that come with the nature of living. You don’t rush to the end of the story when you’re only midway through the book.
She’s got one of Flora’s hands, and Dani has the other, swinging her happily back and forth like no time has passed. It is 1987, Bly, two women who’d do anything for this little girl; it is 2007, California, two women who’d do anything for the woman she’s become. Not everyone is so lucky, Jamie thinks, to find themselves here. Not everyone gets to watch seeds planted in such rocky soil bloom.
Flora is giggling, and Miles is clinking glasses with Owen, and Hannah is spinning with Henry in a clumsy tangle. Dani stands in the middle of the pack like she’s never been anywhere else, her eyes roving hungrily from one happy face to the next. She lands on Jamie and stills, one hand extended.
You blink, she thinks, knowing how fast fifty will become seventy-five. Knowing, too, that it doesn’t matter. Dani Clayton is the same--not the same--both, intertwined, as she’d been in 1987. Flora Wingrave’s giggle is unchanged. A family, once chosen, keeps beng chosen for as long as they can stand it.
You blink.
But first, you give the story the attention it so richly deserves.