little green (like the color when spring is born)

by goldenslumbersfanfiction

Summary:

‘And she is so scared because she never had a good example of parenting, and she doesn't really know what it looks like to be an adult in that way. She wonders though, if anyone really does, and you assure her you don’t have any of the answers either. She tells you that kids were never in her cards, never in her plan, but she wouldn’t mind figuring out the answers with you.’

Or, a v soft exploration of motherhood.

You have made a very big mistake. You have vastly misread this situation. You are sure your face is beet-red and your eyes are wide and you are stammering around your words, trying to take them back.

You are so embarrassed because Jamie is just looking at you in absolute shock. Her mouth is hanging open, and her eyes are going wild, and her face is doing things you can not read and you feel like you have just thrown a stick of dynamite into a volcano.

You have vastly misattributed Jamie’s attention toward the precocious 4-year-old boy who comes into the shop with his mother every other Sunday to get flowers for his grandmother. And less than one minute ago, you had looked at her so sweetly, like you often do during a lull in your work day, and said ‘We should have a baby,’ and she was absolutely not expecting you to say that, and to be honest, neither were you.

Your skin feels prickly and cold and your chest feels tight and Jamie is coming up to you with a look of concern etched into her face, and she’s rubbing your arms up and down, telling you to breathe, in and out, and you realize that you haven’t done that so you take a big breath and exhale and some of the pressure in your chest releases.

“Really worked yourself up over that one, huh, love?”

You shake your head, and bury your face in your hands, tell her, “Can we just forget I said that?”

Jamie laughs and pulls you into a hug. “We absolutely can not.”

“Really, Jamie. It’s not even something that I’ve been thinking about.”

It’s not untrue. You have, in theoretical, intangible, fleeting ways, you have, but nothing that implies yearning, nothing that classifies this as something you’ve been keeping from her. Just as something that was always a nice thought, a welcome intrusion, whenever it crossed your mind. She pulls back, looks at you in that way that always makes you feel like she was built to stand in front of you and catch all of the words that fall out of you like rain, look up at all your thoughts like clouds she gets to decipher. “But...is it something that you want?”

“I...I don’t know.”

“Listen. We can talk about it.”

“We don’t have to…”

“Talking isn’t doing, you know.”

“It was just a...stupid thought.”

“I don’t think it was.”

She’s looking at you for a moment, before her hand comes up to your face, tugs your hand down from your mouth, where your thumb has made its way between your teeth. She looks down at your joined hands, her eyebrows creased.

She’s about to say something else, you think, when the bell at the door chimes to let you know that a customer has just walked in. Jamie looks over and tells the person she’ll be with them in a moment. “We’ll talk about it, okay? Later?”

“Yeah?” You’re smiling, you realize. The idea that Jamie isn’t saying no, is saying there will be a conversation, is smirking at you like you are full of surprises she never wants to stop discovering, makes your skin buzz and makes the room seem brighter, somehow.

“Promise.”

She squeezes your hand as she drops it by your side and you watch her switch into a version of Jamie that you love to watch, one who is attentive and talkative and funny with all of your customers, who is personable in a way that surprised the both of you when you first opened the shop. You got to watch her change into this version of Jamie that was confident in a whole new way, who networked and built a community of friends and colleagues and secured a coveted booth at the greenmarket in town every other Saturday morning after only 3 months in business.

But she carries something else now, as you watch her. She is new, again, somehow, after your slip. She is pensive, thoughtful, and she glances over at you and catches your eye, just like she does all the time, but it’s like she’s seeing a new version of you now, too, that she can’t wait to meet.

//

She promised you that you’d talk about it later, and Jamie has never broken a promise to you, so when she opens a bottle of wine after dinner, hands you a glass, turns off the television, and sits next to you on the couch, you talk.

It’s refreshing and a little alarming to your system, still, even after these last few years with her, how swiftly Jamie cuts through the bullshit. How she doesn’t care at all for the shadows, for the shapelessness. So much of your life was filled with running circles around things unsaid, crammed with the thick fog of unuttered truths. And every time Jamie asks you a too-blunt question, or tells you exactly what is on her mind even if it’s heavy, even if it’s silly, every time the clarity of it slices through this fog in your mind that you didn’t even know was there.

Jamie takes a sip of her wine, nestles her feet under your leg on the couch, and she talks. She tells you that she knew she was gay when she was ten. This is something you knew about her, but now she says that she knew she was going to have enough to fight for on her own, and beyond that, her life hadn’t exactly designed her to think about having kids of her own. So it’s not that she doesn’t want them, or that she does and couldn’t, it’s just that she had never been safe enough, secure enough, to think about it as a real possibility.

She says with Miles and Flora, she’d been able to pick the ways she helped raise them for those few years. She tended the vegetable garden that would grow the food for their small bodies, and she’d tease them and push their buttons and ruffle their hair and she was the fun one in the house, somehow. She’d scowl at bad habits they’d pick up and yell sometimes, if she thought they deserved it. She cursed a lot in front of them, because honestly, she thought it was so funny to see Flora go bug eyed every time and look at Hannah like she should reprimand her.

And even though Jamie has lived so much, too much, can take care of herself very well, she still feels like a little kid sometimes, wrapped up in the skin of a grown up like some cruel joke. Like she’s just pretending a lot of the time, to know what she’s doing. Just making it up as she goes along because she never had anyone to teach her. And that’s fine for her, she’s managed, but it scares her to think of raising a kid, when she still feels like one herself.

And then there’s what happened with Mikey. And she knows, she tells you, that she was so small and drowning and it wasn’t her fault. She knows that now, but the burn is still there. The scar is still pink where it healed over. And she is so scared because she never had a good example of parenting, and she doesn't really know what it looks like to be an adult in that way. She wonders though, if anyone really does, and you assure her you don’t have any of the answers either. She tells you that kids were never in her cards, never in her plan, but she wouldn’t mind figuring out the answers with you.

You tell Jamie how children had been written into your plan for as long as you could remember, simply because they had always been in Eddie’s plan. Children with you had always been in Eddie’s plan, so much so that he forgot to ask you about it, and just started talking about your future kids when you were fourteen as if it was already done. And you went along with it, because, yes, children sounded nice, and you did love him. Children were what you should want, because what else would you do?

And the idea of a baby was so lovely, and you think you wanted to be a mother. You think you’d be good at it, better than what you got at least. But every day that the wedding ticked closer, every overly invasive question from a family friend about how soon you’ll start trying that had Eddie’s lips curling, it all made you absolutely sick. It all made your chest feel like it was filled with mold and it made you feel so trapped and every breath you took was musty and suffocating, like you already had shackles too complex to break, like you’d be abandoning so much more than just one man.

You think you wanted to be a mother, but until Jamie, you hadn’t considered wanting to be a parent with someone. You hadn’t ever known to think about who would be on your team, whose hand you’d hold, who’d make you feel supported, like an equal through it all. You hadn’t considered that making the choice, that having this conversation about it, would feel this wonderful. Because it was a choice, now, that you could make . And you could choose not to, and Jamie would not be upset, she would love you just the same. It hadn’t been a choice before, it was just another expectation, another line in your job description, another chapter of a pre-written history waiting for you to show up with your body parts that would serve their purpose for its elegy.

You talk about if you wanted to do this, what your options would be, realistically. You can’t adopt or foster, and this is something that you knew already, because the world is still cold even though you sometimes try to avoid it and focus on what warmth you do have together. But the truth of it shatters the both of you.

It breaks Jamie more, and her mouth turns into a hard line, silent tears tumbling down her cheek, and you wipe them away.

You’re at the end of your bottle of wine, and you know, as Jamie’s eyes close and she leans into your hand, that this is the end of the conversation for tonight, and that’s okay. You know she is time traveling in her thoughts and you can’t make it better, you can’t fix what happened to that version of her all those years ago, but you can kiss this Jamie gently on the corner of her mouth and tug her closer to you on your couch. You can show her tenderness and stability, and wrap your arms around her with her head on your chest. You lay like that for a while, rubbing her back and placing kisses on the crown of her head.

Jamie makes love to you that night and it’s slow and it’s so careful and she undresses you with such reverence like each inch of new skin she uncovers is a wonder. Jamie has gone slow with you like this before, you’ve had sex with her in so many types of ways, but there is something new about this. She kisses down your body like it’s holy and she’s being saved. It feels like being consecrated, as she builds you up with her mouth hot and patient on you, it feels like being exalted, as you cry her name to the heavens as the waves crash through you.

And when she’s above you, you sink two fingers into her and she kisses you as you move together in a way that is so familiar and so comforting but still so good after all this time. She doesn’t take her eyes off you as you work her closer, and you don’t look away either, and it’s so raw like this, you feel so vulnerable and so strong and so connected to her. And when she comes undone around you, moaning into your mouth and spilling into your hand, you hold tight to her as she comes down, kissing you slow and languid as she settles beside you, and you know that no matter what else you decide, Jamie will always be enough.

//

It’s about a week before it comes up again, but in the little time that passes, Jamie does not stop touching you. Her hands skirt your waist and her lips graze your shoulder nearly every time she passes you in the shop. She holds your hand and tugs you closer more openly in public than she has before. She always checks your comfort level, always gives you a reassuring look, but you meet here right where she is every time, squeezing her hand or kissing her lightly in return.

It makes you so absolutely happy, to be seen like this with her. You are proud to have Jamie’s hand in yours. You have been watched, stared at, examined, for so much of your life but no one has ever seen you the way she does.

You’re out to dinner one night after you caught a movie when she brings it up again. You’re at one of your favorite restaurants, and you have a table by the window and it’s just started to snow. You love the snow, even this late in the winter when everyone else is sick of it, most of all Jamie. You love the way the air smells right before it starts falling, and you love to watch big fluffy flakes swirl around and dust everything you can see. You’re staring out the window, mesmerized, watching as it starts to fall, when she lightly nudges your leg under the table and you turn to look at her.

“Been thinking.”

Your heart skips a little bit when you see the way she’s looking at you after she says it. She’s so nervous, so you slip your hand into hers on top of the table, rub your thumb along her knuckles. You know she’s been thinking. You’d caught her staring at kids on the street with a curious look in her eye all week, with a surprised glint and a slight shake of her head that tells you that maybe she wants this more than she originally thought. You’d caught her staring at you, too, like she’s reveling in the possibility of knowing you in a whole new way.

“So have I,” you say, because you have. You’ve been thinking about what words any child of yours would say with Jamie’s accent, what their favorite color would be, what it would be like to make them pancakes for breakfast on the weekends. You’ve been thinking about the half bedroom you have in your apartment that’s really just for a file cabinet, Jamie’s bike, and your yoga mat, and how nice it would look painted light green.

Her nervous smile morphs into this bashful, excited little thing. “I think...there’s worse things than you and me trying not to screw up a kid.”

“Is that the kind of rousing confidence you hope is going to get me to say yes?”

She laughs, squeezes your hand. “Needs some work?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Not gonna lie to you. It scares the shit out of me, to be honest. But I also haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.”

“Me, either.”

“I think we’d be pretty good. We make a good team already.”

“Yeah, we do.”

“We’d have to take a look at our finances. I know we wanted to expand the business eventually, but that might have to wait a bit, if we decided to do this. Think it’d be worth it though. So...all I’m saying is...if you want to, I do too. And we don’t have to decide, like, right now. And we can change our mind. Don’t even know how we’d go about it exactly if we wanted to...don’t want to get our hopes up, either, but…”

You’re still holding her hand, and she looks so nervous and she’s rambling a little and this is a quality you’ve come to associate with yourself, and only very rarely Jamie. But you know when she’s like this, that she’s overwhelmed by the intensity of her own feelings, that she’s somewhat stunned that she’s lucky enough to be feeling this much good at all. She sounded exactly the same when she proposed opening The Leafling, and when she asked you, after you gave her a ring and asked for a promise, if she could take you to this place in Utah she heard about, where there are white and yellow trees that all share one root system, that is 80 thousand years old and is still alive, making it one of the largest and oldest single organisms on earth, and if you could make your promises to each other there.

You think about that promise, when she took your hands when the sun was just setting, casting everything in gold, just the two of you, standing on earth older than time, standing between these trees that know absolutely everything. It was there on that sacred earth she whispered to you that you’d always be connected, always be one, always survive whatever weather came your way. You think she brought you there because it was the closest to forever something can get on this earth. It was the closest thing to transcendence, to magic, to steadiness. You felt infinite, like you always do with Jamie’s hand in yours.

You feel it now, in this little restaurant while it snows and you talk about growing with her in this new way. And you are reminded, when she holds open your coat for you to slide your arms through to ward off the cold, of a night years ago when you jumped head first into her, when you closed your eyes and decided to trust yourself. You are reminded, as she opens the door for you, slips your joined hands into her pocket so they can stay warm and linked, of how absolutely wonderful it turned out to be, how completely fulfilling and clarifying it was. How it gave you the strength for a fresh start, how it gave you the light you needed to shine away the shadows that had still been lurking in your mind.

You walk home, and when you crawl into bed, you curl in close to her, your skin still cold and prickling but quickly warming under your blankets and from the heat of your bodies. You kiss her, and you tell her that you’re ready to trust yourself, trust her, and see where it takes you.

//

It’s not like you decided in one week after never talking about it before, but you knew then, that night curled against her against the cold, that you both wanted it, even if you had to wait an appropriate amount of time to actually start figuring it out. It’s a big decision, and both you and Jamie know things about big decisions, and big mistakes, but you also know things about taking great, terrifying chances. So you wait a little bit to make sure. You live with the desire of it for a little while, and it’s nice, to want it.

You talk with Jamie about it often, and once you say for certain that you want to do this, you decide you want to carry the baby. It is not something that really interested Jamie much anyway, and once you make that big decision about your body, you feel different, even though you haven’t done anything yet, even though you honestly don’t even know if you can get pregnant. But you feel different, somehow, bigger. You never really considered how your body has the potential to stretch in this way, to create something for you and for Jamie and for the world that wasn’t there before. To create something entirely it’s own.

//

When you go in for your first appointment, you go alone. It’s something you and Jamie decided might be best, and when your doctor asks if you have a husband, or if you are single, you freeze.

You and Jamie have built a home and a wonderful community of friends now, and you are always aware of the way the world beyond that bubble operates, but it still surprises you sometimes how isolating it can be, to be who you are in a place that wasn’t built for you.

There must be something very readable on your face, and she has a knowing smile on her face when she apologizes, amends her question to ask if you have a partner. When you tell her yes, she tells you you’re welcome to bring them in for your visits, if you need the support, that this is a very hard process for some, and having a hand to hold helps to ease the fears.

You grow to feel something like comfortable with her, and she asks you questions and you tell her about Jamie and you relax a bit when she asks you more about her because she genuinely wants to know, and you are so grateful.

You bring Jamie the next time you go, and she smiles and shakes her hand and walks the two of you through the process and she makes you feel very normal and so supported. Jamie doesn’t let your hand go the whole time, even though you are sure you are squeezing it hard, and it helps, because everything is so sterile, and so strange, all of the pastel colors you usually feel at home around suddenly cold and clinical, and you need to remember why you’re doing this.

But Jamie kisses your temple, and offers reassuring smiles, and rubs your arm, and makes one too many puns about vaginas that you threaten to tell Owen about. And you’re sitting on the edge of this chair, sitting on the edge of this cliff with your legs dangling over the side, but with Jamie next to you, you’re ready to jump right in.

//

Your life goes on as normal, you fix dinner when Jamie fucks it up, you go to the bank every Friday afternoon on your lunch break, Jamie wakes up early on Tuesdays for the deliveries at the shop, kissing you goodbye every time even if you’re half awake. Your cat, Weed, always comes into the bathroom while you’re taking a shower and swats at the curtain if you forget to close the door all the way, and come hell or high water, you make sure you are home every Monday night at 8 to watch The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Except now you have this: the waiting.

You have a calendar hung up in your kitchen, and the days seem to drag by like they’re scraping claws through your skin. You don’t expect it to happen on the first try, and maybe you’re a little foolish, a little naive, but you don’t expect it not to happen either.

You’d spent years of your life thinking that this is what you were supposed to do, what so many people from another lifetime ago just expected would happen, that eventually, you expected it, too. That this would just be the natural course of events if you laid down and let it happen. And you know now, that it was all wrong before, but it doesn't mean your brain wasn’t wired with this pattern of thinking, rigged with these pitfalls and traps of shame. So when you wake up on a Tuesday morning, alone in your bed after Jamie has left, with cramps in your belly and your brain all foggy in that particular way, you cry.

You wonder what all that effort was for, all that pain, all that unlearning, trying to fit yourself neatly into a box and then clawing yourself free of it, trying to warp your bones into something that looked like the right kind of woman only to have to break them yourself to get them to grow back right this time. What was it all for, if you couldn’t even get this right when you actually wanted it?

Jamie comes home when you call the shop and tell her and you cry even harder when she brings you flowers and sits with you on the bathroom floor, letting you get her shirt snotty and wet with your tears and whispers sweet reassurances into your hair.

After about an hour, she heads back out to the shop, because it’s still just a Tuesday, but she tells you to stay home today. She still calls and checks in on you throughout the day, and when she comes back that evening, you feel a little better, and she has takeout from your favorite restaurant, and an impressive assortment of sweets from the bakery down the block.

You manage to squeeze all of this food onto your small coffee table, some containers dangling precariously over the edge that Weed tries to knock over when he thinks you aren’t looking, but Jamie pushes him away with her foot every time, and you don’t even get plates, Jamie just hands you a fork and you have at it.

You watch a movie, something old and happy, something simple, and when you’re fed and full, Jamie cleans everything up, and you curl up in her arms. She asks if you’re okay, and you tell her yes, because it’s true. You are okay, even if you are sad. You will try again. And that is where the bravery is, in the trying.

//

After three months, Jamie suggests you take a long weekend just the two of you, away from it all, and you go to New York to have some unbridled fun and to clear your head. It’s almost six hours in the car, but it’s August and you keep the windows down the whole way, and Jamie loves to drive when it’s like this. Just her and the summer wind, and you and the map, and all of the cassettes you brought with you.

You had decided that you would try for six months, and if nothing happened, you would reassess. It was a lot on your body and your mind and your finances, and it wasn’t anything you couldn't handle, but when Jamie suggested getting away just for a few days, you felt some of the stress that had been building up in your body as you reached the halfway point of your agreement release just a little at knowing Jamie could tell exactly what you needed. She could always tell.

You stick your hand out the window, let your palm ride the waves of the wind, let it catch all the sunshine it can. You realize that you’ve forgotten lately, as you watch Jamie take a sip from her root beer you picked up at a rest stop, listen to her sing badly along to a cassette as she drives down the New York State Thruway, that you’re still so young. You’ve forgotten lately, as you prop your feet up on the dashboard and punch her arm every time you see a Volkswagen Beetle on the road, of how much fun your life with her is. You’ve been so worried about the time you’re running out of, the time you’re losing, so distracted with filling your time ahead with something in particular.

It’s not that you lost sight, or took advantage, exactly. But when you reach over and rest your hand on the back of Jamie’s neck like you always do on car rides, mindlessly rubbing her ear while she drives, it feels like an alignment, a recalibration, like magnetism, snapping back to exactly where you belong.

You’re only in New York for three days, and you don’t do a lot of the touristy things, that was never Jamie’s style, but you do walk the entire length of Central Park, and go to the top of the Empire State Building where Jamie gets a penny from a penny press machine and she’s way more excited about it than anyone over the age of thirteen should be.

You spend an hour or so looking out at the expanse of buildings below you. It’s so much more quiet up here than you thought it would be, just the sound of the breeze. The sky is so blue and the sun is so bright and the light ricochets off the buildings, making them glimmer gold. The city sprawls out below you and you can see it all, and it all looks so peaceful, so small from up here, so organized. You think, how amazing, that something can be both limited and boundless. You could spend your whole life in this city and not explore every crevice, not turn every corner, not try every restaurant or visit every park. But you could come up here, 103 stories high, you could look at it all, and think ‘wouldn’t it be something to try.’

On your last night you go to Henrietta Hudson, and it’s not your first time at a gay bar, but you get a little more drunk than you planned, and you kiss Jamie in such a way that has several other women, including the bartender, hollering their approval at you and someone buys you and Jamie drinks and it’s so fun. And when she pushes you up against the wall in the bathroom, kisses you hot and unrestrained, and fucks you with two fingers against the sink, you fit your moans into the crook of her neck and you come apart on her hand, with your legs wrapped around her and your nails scratching at the skin of her waist and her shoulder under her shirt. You haven’t done anything this fast and dirty in a really long time, especially in a place that wasn’t your shop, and you are slightly embarrassed but mostly buzzing with how perfect it feels regardless. The women at this bar are very keen, because when you get back to your stools, two shots are waiting for each of you from three women near the door, and one of them gives you a thumbs up and Jamie laughs when you turn red.

It’s wonderful to be seen like this, wonderful to be seen happy and when everything feels right, even if it’s a little wild. When you’re surrounded by strangers, but still feel like you’re in a room full of your friends. Jamie's eyes only glimmer for you, and you like this, when other people know you are hers. And you think about love and possession and how they are completely not the same, but you also think about belonging. And Jamie is yours, and you are hers, but only in the sense that when you are together, you feel settled, connected, part of each other, even when it’s a little crazy. Only in the sense that she feels like home, that you belong with her, that you belong with each other.

When you get home, you feel refreshed. Calm. New York was clarifying in this thrilling, intense, tangible way that life always is with Jamie. You always knew she was enough for you, you always knew she’d hold tight to your hand and go with you wherever you wanted to go, and you’d do the same with her. If at the end of all of this, it’s still just you and her, you will be so happy, and you think, how lucky, to be at this fork in the road, with two equally beautiful paths.

It certainly takes the knots out of your shoulders as you head back to the doctors office once again. It takes the clench out of your jaw, the tension out of your neck, the wringing out of your hands.

And you think, maybe, that’s what does it.

//

She doesn’t know it yet, in this moment, as she tries once again to prepare something resembling dinner, that you’re about to take her hand and jump with her into something brand new and wonderful.

You get home, and she thinks you met your friends from your travels for dinner while they’re in town this week, so she looks at you confused but happy, because you’re back earlier than she expected. You let the moment breathe, kiss her, taste this version of her one last time before you turn her into someone new that you can’t wait to meet. You hold her close, your head resting in the crook of her neck, smiling against her skin, and hear her laugh a little, pull you tighter, and hum at the joy of holding you.

You cover her hand with yours where it sits on your waist and move it, gently, to your belly.

You wait, your grin growing wide when she stills, gasps, and changes right in your arms as you clutch her close, and it’s one of the most beautiful things you have ever experienced. She pulls back to look at you, and she’s new, and full of wonder.

“Dani, are you serious?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I just came from the doctor.”

“Oh my god.” Jamie's hand is still on your belly, and she kisses you, and her other hand comes up to your cheek to pull you closer, and she is trembling. You kiss her back, and eventually you’re both just smiling so wide you can’t properly manage it anymore. “When did you...how did you...”

She can’t form sentences around the grin on her face, and you know the feeling. You haven’t even said the words yet out loud because you are just so breathless by the truth of it.

“I took a test earlier, and...I don’t know why I didn’t tell you right away, I just...I wanted to be sure. Really sure. And I didn’t want to be at work, or at the doctor’s office. I wanted to kiss you when I told you. I wanted it to be just us.”

Jamie is looking at you with wide, bright eyes. And she loves you so much, and you love her the same, and now you have something you can love together, and how absolutely lucky that thing is, to get the both of you.

You reach into your purse and pull out the little slip from the doctor to show her. It’s just letters, and ink on paper that says ‘positive’ but it’s so much more than that. Jamie takes it in her hands like it’s a treasure, like it’s a delicate little flower, and just looks at it, then she looks back up at you just the same, her eyes tearing up.

“You’re pregnant.”

“Yeah. I am.”

“Wow.”

“I know!”

She looks back down at the paper, and you just watch her take it in.

“I’m due in May.”

“May.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a good month.”

You laugh, tell her, “The best month,” because you know how much Jamie loves May. When everything that has begun to sprout in March and April really starts to sing, really starts to shine, and the weather is warm but not too hot, and everything is just right.

She’s nodding, and still looking at this paper, and her lip is trembling, and she sniffles.

“You okay?”

She looks back up at you, a tear falling down her cheek.

“I just...I didn’t think I would ever have this.” Her voice cracks when she says it, “Didn’t think I would ever be this happy.” You pull her in and she buries her face in your neck and wraps her arms around you tight. You stand like that for a little while, crying and laughing and clutching your whole world close, and eventually Jamie’s hands come back around to your belly and she kisses you, so sweetly, whispers how much she loves you into the small space between your lips.

When you settle into bed for the night, happy and tired, Jamie curls up behind you, pulling you in, her hand drawing little patterns against the skin below your belly button, her smile pressing into your shoulder, and you can already tell, with sheer delight, that Jamie is not going to stop touching you for the next eight months. That she is not going to want to miss a single moment of how you are going to change, that she is going to want to feel every version of your body this will turn you into, love it every step of the way.

//

When you hear the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, this fast, squirmy little thing, Jamie is holding your hand and she kisses your palm and you feel wetness on your fingertips that tells you she is crying, but you can not look away from the screen. And it’s not much, and you have no idea what you’re looking at really, not in the way the doctor does who tells you everything looks great, but you’re transfixed by this little undefined oval on the screen all the same. When you finally look over to Jamie, she tears her eyes away from the monitor to look at you, too. You squeeze her hand, and she kisses you.

On the ride home, Jamie starts to ramble off all the things she needs to do around the apartment to get it ready for the baby. You had decided in the last few weeks that you would stay in your apartment for now, until you truly outgrew it and could afford someplace nicer.

When you get back, Jamie makes lists. She is thorough with them, peering into every corner of this space and noting what needs mending, what needs to be better, and this is how she loves you. With hammers and nails, and fresh coats of paint. Putty knives to fix cracks and screwdrivers to make things stronger.

You see this version of her around the shop sometimes, when things need fixing, or when she’s reorganizing the stockroom or welcoming a shipment. This same one that grazed through a manor, her steady, sure hands wrapped around a tool to fix anything that needed it. The one who first caught your eye, the one who you knew would put the work into loving you if you returned it with tender hands. It makes you smile, it makes the sparks crackle in your chest, knowing how taken care of this tiny thing already is, how lucky the two of you got, to get Jamie to build you a home.

//

You’re finally at the point where you can start telling people, and you realize that you haven’t spoken to your mother in over six months.

She knows about you, and about Jamie, although you suspect she still thinks you’re going to snap out of it any second now, even though it’s been five years since you came out to her, even though you have the most established and stable life of anyone your mother knows.

You call her and she sounds surprised to hear from you. She immediately asks if something is wrong, because for some reason she can't fathom you’d want to just talk to her. You can’t fault her though, because it’s kind of the truth. But she asks again, a bit more genuine, a side of her coming out that you rarely get to hear, because you sound nervous, you sound scared, you sound excited, somehow, all at once. You tell her that you’re pregnant, and after a moment of stunned silence and a barrage of invasive questions you knew to expect, she lets out a little laugh that sounds like joy, and she congratulates you, and you can feel that she means it even if it confuses her.

She asks how you feel, and you tell her that your morning sickness has passed, that you were exhausted a lot the last two months, but now you feel good. She doesn’t offer any advice, and you’re grateful, because really you do not want that from her.

Jamie had left you alone in your bedroom for you to make this call, at your request, and you’re genuinely shocked when your mother asks to speak to her. They’ve spoken only three times before, over five years, and the first time barely counts because Karen just wanted confirmation you weren't making up lies, and after each conversation, Jamie needed a stiff glass of whiskey.

You go into the kitchen where she’s on the floor fixing the cabinets, and she’s been so good lately about getting to everything she put on her lists, and you tell her to pick up the phone because your mother wants to talk to her. At first she laughs and says, ‘Nice one, Poppins. How’d it go, though?’ and she’s shooing away the cat who keeps trying to headbutt her arm as she works, but she realizes you’re serious when she glances toward you and sees your expression and she bangs her head on the side of the cabinet trying to get up in her haste.

You are anxious when you watch Jamie pick up the phone line in your kitchen, greet your mother, and listen to whatever it is she has to say to her. Jamie’s replies really don’t give much away, and you can tell she is trying to sound warm enough, crack a few jokes that don’t seem to be received well, and you drift around the kitchen, opening cabinets trying to find that bottle of whiskey for her. But when she hangs up, she gently tugs your hand down from where you’re moving things around on a top shelf, and wraps your arms around her.

“Don’t need your usual Karen Clayton on the rocks?”

“No, just you,” and she kisses you and she feels relaxed as she pulls you in closer.

This is truly, very strange. You don’t think anyone who has ever interacted with your mother in all of time has come away looking so at ease. You laugh a little, stunned, ask, “What did she say to you?”

You get a sweet kiss and she shrugs, says, “Wasn’t really what she said, so much as what’s behind it.” Jamie looks thoughtful, as she rubs her hands along your waist to pull you in close, “Think she loves you more than either of you really know what to do with, is all. She just wants to make sure you’re happy.”

“I am.”

“I certainly hope so. Otherwise, you’ve led me on quite a bit.”

You laugh, and you kiss her, and you go to the movies that night and see A League of Their Own one last time before they stop showing it, and it’s just the two of you in the whole theater, and Jamie is ecstatic about it and her glee makes you beam. It’s one of those instances you stumble upon every now and then, when things line up just right, and you get a little something extra from the universe. Like wide open highways, snow on Christmas morning, that song on the radio you couldn’t get out of your head, finding your favorite snack hidden in the back of the cabinet just when you were craving something sweet.

She really squeezes this one for all its worth, gets Junior Mints and Sour Patch Kids and popcorn and a big cup of root beer, and she props her legs up on the seat in front of her and she sings along the team song at the top of her lungs just to make you laugh, and you throw popcorn at her.

You feel more like an adult now than you ever have, doing all the stuff a teenager would, and you know that age is just a layer, and that under it all you’re still fifteen and confused over the flutter in your chest from new girl sitting next to you in math, still twenty-one and discovering how much you love teaching, you’re still twenty-five and finally admitting what you want to yourself after a lifetime of being numb, you’re twenty-six and seeing Jamie for the first time as she walked into the kitchen in a manor, not knowing the dust she was kicking up on her heels that would set your world on fire. It was sudden, really, with Jamie. You met her, and you let yourself jump, because you knew anything less would be a shame.

And you wonder what all those women would think of this version of you, the one who took a chance in a way they’d all pointedly avoided thinking about, sitting in an empty movie theater with everything you didn’t know you wanted, everything you didn’t even think to ask for, and somehow, whatever good thing was calling the shots still thought to give you a little something extra. You hope they would be proud, but you think that they would probably be scared of you, and that’s okay. It’s good, you think, that they would be a little bit terrified. It only shows just how brave you had to be to get here.

//

Jamie is absolutely obsessed with your belly. You don’t blame her, though. You can’t stop touching it either. It’s kind of strange and weird, but also, it’s so fucking cool. It feels really nice every time you touch it, and you are showing unmistakably now that you’re 5 months along, and you feel like you have this authority now, like you’ve tapped into some special power you only get for this brief time. People look at you differently than they used to. They offer you chairs and for you to skip lines at stores, and Jamie is thrilled by this perk, especially, pouting when you ask to stay in the car on errands because she will be waiting an extra fifteen minutes in line somewhere.

Jamie has her hands on you the first time you ever feel the baby kick and it overwhelms you so much, you start crying right there in the middle of the shop.

Jamie decides to close up early because really, you are inconsolable and your emotions are on overdrive lately but this sent you over the edge, and three customers have asked if you are okay before Jamie decided it was time to call it a day. It’s starting to snow, and she says she wants to get home before it gets too bad, but you know it’s because of you. You don’t mind though, because she runs you a bath to get the chill of the winter air out of your bones, and your apartment is small, and it will get even smaller soon, and there are a lot of things that aren’t ideal about it, but god, you love this tub. It’s so big, and it fits the both of you with room to spare.

You settle in between her legs, your back pressed against her chest as she runs hot soapy water along your belly and chest and kisses your cheek and your neck.

You talk about your baby, what they might be like when they get here, what they might be like in two, six, twenty years from now.

You spend so long in the tub that you have to drain some of the cold water and fill it up with hot, and Jamie runs into the kitchen to grab a bunch of snacks and some leftovers, trailing water all through your hall that she promises she will wipe up, and you laugh when she settles back in, opposite you this time, and cracks open a can of soda and scoops some salsa onto a chip and offers it up for you.

You know things will change when the baby gets here, and you’re genuinely not quite sure you will get Jamie just like this ever again, and that’s okay. You’ll get her in new ways, different ways. Wonderful ways. You’ll be someone new too, but you let yourself be here, be young, be in love, be pregnant, belong here in this tub, all of it swirling in the water around you like soap, making you clean and pure and washing away everything else.

//

The baby kicks all the time now, especially when you settle in for the night and try to sleep. You are always reaching for Jamie’s hand and placing it on your belly where you feel it so she can feel, too. You love the look on her face when you do this, when she brings both hands to your belly in the middle of the grocery store aisles, wraps her arm around you in your bed when she’s drifting into sleep, when she’s driving and you pull her hand from the center console and place it near your waist where your baby is digging a foot into your ribs.

She looks radiant and filled with awe every time, like she can’t believe she gets to love you more, somehow, than she ever thought she could.

//

With less than two months to go, you’ve started accumulating quite a bit of stuff for this baby, but when Jamie paints the small half bedroom this beautiful sage green color you picked out, it starts to feel so much more real than you though it could.

You’re growing, like you planned, like you have been for months now, and this baby has been making themselves very known by pressing a limb up against your ribs and your bladder at inconvenient times, but now you’re making space in your home for them. Jamie comes home at least once a week with some stupidly adorable onesie or a tiny little hat that she found at a shop when she was out running errands, and it’s all piling up in the small dresser drawers and you are so excited to hold this baby in your arms.

Jamie finishes painting, and puts together the furniture you got, and now there’s a rug on the floor and a lamp in the corner, and Jamie hasn’t quite figured out how to piece the crib together, but you still have time. You fill this little space with all the love you can, you organize all the books on a shelf that your friends from the bookstore down the block from The Leafling gave you. You fold the blanket one of your regular customers crocheted for you over the back of the handmade rocking chair that was a gift from your dear friends Will and Ben, who you had met years ago on your travels, all three of you escaping the clutches of lives unwanted, looking for kinder hands to hold. When you told them the news, they drove down with it in their trunk from where they had settled in Montreal and hugged you so tight and so happy and you never thought you’d be lucky enough to have friends like them.

Owen had sent you this set of bibs with food puns on them, clearly custom embroidered with his personal favorite witticisms, and Jamie groaned so loud when she opened the box.

Telling Owen was your favorite call to make. He is not shy in his emotions like so many men you meet, and it was wonderful, to hear his happiness for you, his elation, woven through his voice, coating it thick and cheerfully wet. You’ve heard people speak like this to you before, when they spoke of rings and dresses and churches and bells. And then, you couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed, couldn’t help but think like they were overreacting, couldn’t help but wonder what on earth was meant to fill that space in your chest that was supposed to feel it, too. But when you called Owen, you were ready to receive it, and you understand, then, what it feels like to build a family bigger than what you can wrap your arms around, what it feels like to have love tucked away safely in pockets of this world, always ready to be given to you.

You’re ready to go, now. It’s still scary, even when you’re prepared, even when you’re ready, even when you’ve been waiting, standing on this cliff’s edge with your parachute secure. Everything will change, you will be different, but you’ll know what it’s like, to jump. And when you get nervous, when you get scared, you still see that Jamie lights up like she always has when you enter a room. She still waits for you by the front door and places her hand on your back when you’re heading out to work together. She still kisses you when you finish your lunch and she still teases you about how bad you are at making tea.

And you know, that some things, the best things, will always be the same.

//

You wake and you feel like you are drifting along a river, and your body feels so heavy and there is a song, a simple sweet melody of ‘sleep pretty darling, do not cry’ that lulls you as you float between realms. There is something coursing through your veins that is making it very hard to think. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know what has happened, but your throat is dry and when you try to move your hands there are wires and you feel like you are glued to your bed you are so weary.

You must make a noise, and the sweet song stops, and you’re hearing your name. It’s Jamie saying your name. You feel her hand on your shoulder, on your forehead, and then she’s gone, and then there is someone else there and your bed is moving so you’re sitting up. You open your eyes and everything is so bright and you are remembering some things, some things are starting to come back to you. You’re in a hospital, you are having the baby, Jamie is standing at the foot of your bed, clutching a little bundle of yellow blankets. You see it, you see it right in front of you and the doctor is gently pushing you back into your bed because you tried to get right up and be close to them. The doctor is shining lights into your eyes, and is handing you a cup of water and each sip brings the world into sharp clarity around you.

Jamie smiles at you, nods reassuringly, and she’s holding your baby and all you want to feel is this joy completely, and have this moment with her, but you can read some fear in her eyes, some terror, some great relief, and she says, “Just listen to the doctor, love.”

You listen, and you learn that you have been unconscious for three days. Something had gone wrong, you had lost a lot of blood. You have a daughter, she is perfect, with ten fingers and ten toes. And they need to run some more tests on you, and you need to stay through the end of the week, but you are okay now, out of the woods.

The doctor leaves, and you are so tired, and Jamie is just looking at you from the foot of your bed, holding your daughter, and she looks so small, she looks like a mess, she looks ten years older than the last time you saw her. Her lip is quivering the longer she looks at you, and her eyes are welling up.

“Jamie?” You say her name, and she breaks. She heaves one wet, messy sob of relief, and one of her hands comes up to her mouth, her eyes squeezed shut and she gathers herself and wipes her eyes and you reach out to her, you just want to hold her. “Come here.”

She walks over to the side of your bed and you know there are things you need to talk about, you know that there are things Jamie has gone through while you’ve been unconscious that you can’t possibly fathom the pain of. You know it from the gray under her eyes, and the tight clench in her jaw, and the handbag and the coat on the chair in the corner that you know does not belong to her.

But right now, she sits on the side of your bed, facing you, and she’s smiling now and holding your baby, and suddenly, everything is soft. Everything is quiet, and everything is perfect.

You just look at this new person, and she’s here and it’s so much for you to wrap your head around, but she wraps her little hand around your finger as she sleeps and she has the tiniest fingernails and these perfect little lips and her eyelashes are so long and she’s yours, and you’re crying, and Jamie is kissing your tears and kissing your cheek and you turn and clutch her closer and you’re so much more now, the two of you.

Jamie places her in your arms, and she’s already three days old and you’ve missed so much, and you can’t see them right now because she’s asleep, but Jamie tells you she has the biggest, bluest eyes.

“Does she, um…did you have to name her?”

“Yeah, but you know. Just decided to keep Baby Girl Clayton. Had a nice ring to it.”

“Jamie.”

She laughs a little and something in her chest releases just a bit. A little noise comes from your arms and you both look down at this new thing, completely enamored, already unsure how you ever lived without her.

“Ah...yeah. I know we didn’t really decide but I, um…” She seems nervous, you realize. “After 2 days they said we should. So…” She smiles down at your daughter, runs the side of her finger along her little cheek. “Luna. Luna Hannah Clayton.”

She is perfect, and you are so overwhelmed and so full and you’re aching with so much love, and you kiss Luna’s soft little forehead, breathing her in, and Jamie tucks your hair behind your ear.

You adjust your bodies and all the wires so Jamie is next to you on the bed and her head rests on your shoulder and you just watch Luna sleep. Jamie tells you that she makes the cutest face when she yawns, and she has the most elegantly long fingers, and she doesn’t know how she manages it with her tiny little lungs, but she can fucking scream.

“Thought for sure you’d come this side of conscious yesterday just to tell her to shut the fuck up.”

You laugh, and you turn and kiss her, so sweetly, and she kisses you back, her hand holding your face close and her fingers are trembling against your skin. And you know when Jamie is upset, you can always tell from the way her mouth scrunches up just a little and from the way her eyes grow dark and heavy. You know, too, there is information you need that you wish you had more time to let her tell you.

“My mother is here, isn’t she.”

You feel the confirmation in Jamie’s body before she even says anything. You feel it, how you just stuck a hole in a dam, how you just pulled one rock free and started an avalanche. She’s looking up at you, her eyes hard but trying not to be, and she nods. She pulls away from you just a little bit, sits up in your bed.

“Yeah, they had to call next of kin.” She isn’t looking at you when she says it, she’s looking at her hands, at her finger, at her ring like it’s supposed to mean everything. Like it should have been enough. And the doctor told you what happened, what your body went through, but it’s only now, with Jamie stiff and angry that you realize just how bad it must have been, just how close you must have come to not being here at all.

She rallys though, like she does when she has to get through telling you something difficult all at once. Looking straight ahead, focused, like she’s entering a fight. And you listen. She tells you when they pulled her out of the room, when she had to call your mother, when Karen arrived that evening and how it was the first time they’d ever met in person. And the two of them do not see eye to eye, but still, she let Jamie make the decisions even if she was the one who had to sign the papers. How technically, if anything happened to you, Luna wouldn’t even be hers, she would be your mothers, at least until Jamie could adopt her, but they didn’t know how that would go, how long it would take, given Jamie’s record, which Karen was less than kind about when she found out. These were the conversations between the two of them that were had above your body, hooked up to machines, in the cafeteria downstairs over terrible coffee, in the nursery, holding your daughter as they were held in the balance.

She looks so tired, worn so thin. And you pull her close to you on your bed and you kiss the space between her eyebrows and you tell her you’re here. That she can breathe easy for today, and tomorrow you will talk and you will help her mend the destruction the last three days has caused in her soul. She curls back up beside you, and you feel her tears on your shoulder. And Luna wakes up, and you get to meet her beautiful little smile and her eyes that are really so, so blue.

The weight of Jamie beside you as you hold your daughter in your arms is possibly one of the most wonderful feelings you have ever felt, to have your entire world pressed near to your chest just like this. To have two of the best choices you have ever made clutched close and breathing in the same air as you.

You see your mother lingering in the hallway, watching you. You don’t acknowledge her, not yet. You’re used to being observed by her, used to being picked over and watched, but you let her look, because you want her to see you now, you want her to see what you made when you were given the sun and the rain to grow. You want her to see what you look like when you are happy, because you are sure she never has. You want to show her this beautiful little world that you made, how absolutely perfect it is, how proud you are of it, how proud you are of how much it fits you.

Eventually though, she comes into the room and pretends like she is surprised to see you awake, and she kisses you on the forehead in this way that makes you want to cry. It’s so soft and as you hold your new daughter in your arms, you know that even though you never really got along with your mother, you were this small once in her arms. And you don’t think you could ever not want to kiss her forehead with all of the tenderness you possess.

Jamie leaves to get you something real to eat and to stop back at the apartment to pick up your favorite sweater and check the mail, and when it’s just you and your mother, who you have not seen in years, she sits at the bottom of your bed. She tells you Luna looks just like you when you were a baby, says she knows you will do a better job than she did, and she tells you, as she stares at a spot on the floor, that she might not ever really understand, but she has never seen anyone love you as fiercely as Jamie does, that she is a good partner, that she is a good woman. She might not ever understand it, but she knows it’s right for you.

It’s more than you ever thought you’d get from her, really. It’s more than you thought she was capable of. It’s not where you hope she would be, but she never really has been what you hoped she would be, but still, it’s enough, and she’s here. She showed up, and she was here for you, she was here for Jamie, and that has to count for something.

//

Luna is taken back to the nursery for the night, and your mother goes back to her hotel, and it’s just you and Jamie now in your room. She brought you sushi and a bottle of Dom Perignon, your special request for your first real meal after you’d given birth.

You love her. She makes you feel so taken care of. She makes you feel so safe, and so comfortable, and so whole. You love that you make her feel this way too. You love that she is your best friend, and you can make her laugh so hard she cries sometimes, and that you get to watch her change and grow into new Jamies all the time. You sip your champagne and you get to know her again, the newest version. You get to know her as a mother, as someone who rocked your baby to sleep three nights in a row, who tells you the songs she’s sung to her, who tells you that the crib is, unfortunately, still not put together, but she promises you she will do it tomorrow when she goes back to the apartment to feed the cat.

You finish your dinner, and your champagne, and she’s sitting in the chair next to your bed, and this new version of Jamie gets lost in her thoughts a little more, her eyes go a little hazy and faraway, so you take her hand and ask her, “What do you need?”

She rests her head on her other hand and she looks at you, draws patterns on your palm and your wrist for a while before she speaks.

“When, um...when things sort of...took a turn for the worse there, at the beginning...your mum had me meet with a lawyer.”

You’re a little surprised such a logical move came at the behest of your mother, but you nod, and let Jamie continue.

“Apparently, there was a case that was just won here? And I’m honestly not too sure on the details, but...it means that I could adopt Luna, fully. Even though we aren’t married. She’d be mine, too. She’d be ours. On paper.”

“Really?”

“Yeah...that’s...that’s what I need.”

“Okay. We’ll make it happen, okay?”

She nods and squeezes your hand, and rests her head on the bed next to your thigh and closes her eyes as you stroke her hair. She lets out this sigh that deflates her, and you think, finally, she can relax just a little bit. There is so much she is feeling, and you rub your thumb along her temple, on the crease between her eyebrows, because you know that no matter what version of Jamie you are loving, whatever version of you that you grow to be, you will always have this. You will always know exactly what to do to make her feel safe.

//

You are discharged from the hospital four days later, and when you get home, you are so ready to breathe in the comforting air of your apartment, so ready to sleep in your own bed.

Luna had been sent home a couple of days before you, and Jamie and your mother had been wonderful about bringing her by the hospital to be with you, but you just want to be in the same place as them, just want to sleep beside them. You just want to be home.

Your mother isn’t at your apartment to welcome you back, and you’re grateful. She had been helpful these last few days, you had managed not to be short with her, but she is not part of your life in this way, at least not yet, and you just want to walk into your home with your family. You just want to figure out this new version of yourself, create these new patterns with just your wife and your daughter.

Karen leaves two days later. She stops by and brings you some groceries that you really didn’t need, and when she unpacks them, she pulls out her ‘parting gift’, a bottle of Malibu rum and some pineapple juice. Jamie almost loses her mind, and you can clearly read her better than your mother, because she makes three of these cocktails without you asking, and slides them toward you and Jamie and holds hers up until the two of you realize she’s waiting for you to clink your glasses with hers.

Jamie reluctantly sips, whispers something under her breath about it being a headache in a cup, but it’s not so bad, especially for a quick cocktail in May, with the weather warm and the fan going and Luna asleep in her room and the air fresh around you.

It’s not so bad, when you see your mother trying. When she hugs you so tight, tells you she’ll call, asks you to send pictures, suggests, maybe, she can come for Christmas. It’s a little too much, and you think she realizes it too, but as you kiss her cheek goodbye, as she pulls Jamie in for a moment more than either of them are comfortable with, but somehow they still hold on even though they are both stiff, you think about bravery, and how much a child it is of trust. You think how bravery is in the trying, how character is in the trying, and how much you have to trust that even if things don’t work out as you plan, you will be better for it no matter what, that you will be different, that you will be someone who tried.

//

Jamie buys a camcorder and these little 8mm cassette tapes start piling up in a box next to your television, filled with hours and hours of videos of Luna, of your little, perfect, life together. She doesn’t even watch them after, she just tapes. She brings this camera everywhere. It’s honestly a little excessive, you think, but Jamie loves it and says a year from now you’ll marvel at how much Luna has grown, and it will be so nice to have the memories.

So nice to have the memories, you think, as you catch Jamie with a little smirk on her face, her tongue between her teeth, pointing the lens directly into your cleavage.

//

Weed takes to Luna better than you would have imagined.

You guess he’s about six years old now, you don’t really know for sure since he was a stray when Jamie picked him up back at Bly, but he’s definitely mellowed out of his rambunctious years. But whenever Luna is in her little rocker he is always sitting next to her, and if she’s crying in her crib he always beats you to her room and he waits beside you until she’s settled.

She’ll wrap her little hand around his tail, or he’ll rest his head in her lap as she naps, and you know you were worried about him for nothing. Jamie had teased, as she always does even though you both know she loves that cat to bits, about how his ‘days are numbered’ and how he ‘better pack his little cat bags if he so much as meows the wrong way’ . But you know she was relieved when he took tentative steps toward Luna when you brought her home, curled up beside her like he knew he needed to protect her, knew if he waited long enough, he’d have a friend. Jamie buys him treats now when she goes to the grocery store, but she still ignores your knowing looks.

//

Owen comes to visit you when Luna is three months old, and he buys her this beautiful play kitchen set that she definitely will not be able to use for a year or so and it takes up too much space in your ever shrinking apartment, but she chews happily on the plastic banana, and he is so excited about it that it’s hard not to love him for it.

He tells you he will be back when she can eat real food because he wants to introduce her to the culinary breadth of mashed meals and threatens to turn her into a baby food diva.

He stays for two weeks, and in between light complaints disguised as passing comments about the shortcomings of your kitchen as he makes you dinners, and playing with Luna, who has taken quite fondly to pulling on his mustache, much to Jamie’s delight, he manages to make friends with the owner of the fanciest restaurant in town, because of course he does.

You get a babysitter on his last night here, and it’s the first time you leave Luna alone with someone else. You trust her, she is the daughter of the woman who owns the bookstore near The Leafling who is home from college for the summer, but still, you worry about it right until you see Jamie has gotten dressed up in a way you have not seen in what feels like ages.

You have been together for some time now, and you are so in love with her no matter what either of you look like, but since Luna was born you have not had any time to dress up or go that extra step. She always looks professional for work, but you knew you were in trouble when she spent more than twice her usual time in the bathroom, and when she comes out she just gives you this little smirk because you are staring at her, stunned. You feel like you did the first time she walked into your room at Bly, looking gorgeous in a black dress in a whole new way you didn’t think could be possible, because you’d already thought her beauty was whole before. Just one of the ways Jamie surprised you that day.

Motherhood is wonderful, parenthood with Jamie only makes you love her more even when it makes you want to scream because it’s also frustrating and stressful, and it’s been three months and it feels like two years, or five days. It’s strange and beautiful, but you realize as you push Jamie against the dresser in your bedroom and take 5 minutes to mess up her lipstick and wrinkle this shirt under her suspenders, that you haven’t been paying much attention to yourself lately.

Luna needs so much of you and your body and there’s not much energy left for anyone else, and that’s okay. Jamie carries so much of it with you, and she still puts fresh flowers on the windowsill for you every Saturday morning, and she still makes sure you get to watch your favorite TV shows, and she shows up for you in these little ways that make you feel so supported, reminds you to carve a few little slivers of time for yourself when you can. And you carve out these minutes that you need, where you palm her chest and you are uncoordinated in your eagerness, messy in your want of her, before the babysitter buzzes your apartment and Jamie grumbles at the loss of you.

You meet Owen inside the restaurant, and you forgot food could taste this good. You forgot what champagne tastes like when you are in a dress, what conversation feels like when you are in heels, what laughter sounds like when it gets interrupted by your waiter, and what Jamie looks like when she orders another cocktail with your hand on her thigh.

Owen tells you about growing up in such a small place, how it was his mum and her boys, but it was all they needed. He talks about his mum now in a way you’ve never seen. When you met, and in the months after, it was always clouded with pain, clothed in the inevitability of the end. But now, with time, he smiles freely when thinking of her. There is fondness, and appreciation, and he tells you he started making meals for her when he was small and feeding a new passion. She would write out his menus on beautiful paper in calligraphy before dinner, and he would serve her and she would ask him questions about everything. He says it was her encouragement, her honesty when she didn’t like something, how she would work with him to make it better, that made him love it all more. She taught him that not everyone was going to like what you serve them, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t someone else’s favorite meal.

When you get into bed later that night, you’d forgotten what your skin feels like after a long night out, warm and buzzing, like a current in your bloodstream that lulls you, the echoes steady and thrumming. Your ears are ringing a little like they always do after nights like these when you drink and laugh so much the apples of your cheeks are sore.

Jamie brings you a cup of water and tylenol and you realize how drunk you must be, even though you only had a couple of glasses of wine, you think. It’s been a whole year since you’ve really done any sort of drinking, and Jamie is laughing at you even though you don’t know why, you are just trying to explain this and how tolerance works and that you are probably a bit drunk and that you can probably put your own pajamas on. She pushes you down into your bed and you are asleep in minutes.

//

It’s been four months since you left the hospital, and you and Jamie have talked as much as you can about what happened. You’ve taken steps to have her adopt Luna, and the process is arduous, but it’s been good, and you can’t stop thinking about the day when Jamie will get to hold your little girl in her arms and you will all have the security of your names on one piece of paper.

It’s almost five am, and you really should try to take these couple hours to sleep, you’d just gotten Luna back down after she woke up half an hour ago, but you’re not very tired anymore, and Jamie shifts in her sleep toward you as you crawl back into bed and curl up against her.

Your body has finally healed enough for you to know that you want her again this way, for you to feel things you haven’t felt in ages. It’s been so long since Jamie has properly touched you, since you’ve had time to, since you’ve wanted her to. After months of Luna constantly on your body, being sore and in skin that felt rubbed raw and oversensitive, you honestly didn’t want anyone to touch you even casually for too long. But you feel good now, and you miss knowing her like this. You miss that version of her when it’s just the two of you just like this. You kiss her cheek, her jaw, her neck lightly, and you say her name as she starts to stir.

“Hm…what? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing...Nothing’s wrong.”

You kiss her fully but gently on her lips and you feel her eyebrows raise when you lightly swipe your tongue along her bottom lip and she gasps. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Only if you want,” you pull back a little, to wait for her answer, because she needs to be sure too, but without missing a beat she is chasing your lips and gently flipping you over and kissing you into your pillow. And you’ve kissed her like this a few times since you’d gotten back from the hospital, when you’d been able to steal a some time with just her, when you’ve had more than five minutes to take it just a bit past tender, just a bit farther than sweet, but it’s hasn’t had this intention of it going further in so long, and it feels so different but so familiar.

Jamie is careful and loving, like she always is, and you are both learning your body again because it’s different, new, healing, but she takes her cues from you when you scratch your nails down her back under her sleep shirt and suck hard on her bottom lip, and she is not delicate with you. She is not tentative, like you feared she might be. Her touch is sure and firm and everything you need as she undresses you and sucks marks into your collarbone and your stomach and her hands are greedy and a little rough, and they are everywhere. You tug her shirt off and you stop kissing her long enough to get the both of you completely out of your clothes, and you’re dizzy and buzzing already and a firm press of her hand could probably send you over, but it’s been so long, and you want this thing done properly.

When you’re completely naked, Jamie hovers above you, her touch light, reverent, slowing your slightly frantic pace down for a moment as she traces over your skin, kisses along your jaw, your collar, back up to your lips. You tug her down to lay on top of you and you revel in how good this feels, how your bodies sink into one another so perfectly. She makes this little noise that sounds like a sigh, sounds like a plea, then she slips her tongue into your mouth and curls her hands around your thighs to fit them around her hips, and you gasp as she presses down into you and sparks run up your spine.

And you know you’ve talked about everything that happened those three days you were not awake, you know the sharpness of her fears and you’ve helped her find ways through the panic they sometimes bring. And she tells you she’s good, and you believe her, but you also know that sometimes Jamie does not fully process things until she can do so without words. Until there is something physical, something with cause and effect, something that her hands can do to take the burden off her mind.

You give as much as she takes, and when she slips two fingers into you and you sigh her name, you feel wetness against your cheek. You keep her close, your hands buried in her curls, along her back, as she builds you up, your breaths coming in sharp bursts against her mouth, and her eyelashes are glistening as she kisses you, tongue and teeth and reckless noises spilling from both of you. You tug her as close as possible, urge her deeper because she feels so good and you need her to know how much you need her. You need her to know how alive she makes you feel. She speeds up her thrusts, her thumb coming up to circle your clit, and it’s been so long since you’ve felt like this, so long since you’ve been close to her like this, and you know she feels it too, because she stretches it out, keeps you hanging in the balance for so long, slowing down and speeding up until you are nothing but a frayed mess below her. She laughs a little at the joy of you here, elated by her effect on you, when you whine as she slows down once again, after bringing you so close to the edge you could taste it.

You slip your thigh between her legs and she presses herself down into you, moaning into your mouth at the relief of it. You wrap one hand around the back of her neck, the other Jamie threads through her own and pushes up, above your head, pressing your linked fingers into your pillow, and she’s looking at you as she slows the pace down and adds a third finger, filling you and stretching you. If up until now was a wildfire, magnificent in its grandeur, this is burning embers, glowing and blistering and crackling and contained, and still hot enough to a warm a home with it’s steady, intentional rhythm, and the two of you gasping into the space between your lips.

She kisses you as you unravel, and your leg tightens around her hip, her hand trapped between you working magic only she has ever given you, your fingers curl tighter against her neck and her hand, and you have no agency over what you are saying, just a string of Jamie’s name, of curses, of sounds and affirmations falling from your lips as the feeling of her completely overtakes you. She follows you over after you bring your hand down between her legs to give her what she needs, and she’s spilling onto you and clutching your hand tight as she comes completely undone.

She’s shaking above you as you come down and catch your breath, kissing you slow, her lips trembling, her tears coming quicker now, hot and persistent, and she pulls out of you, immediately grasping for your hip, her hand still coated with you, and you gently roll her over so you are both on your sides and still flush together, and you swipe your thumb along the tracks on her cheek and she kisses you. She lets out this sigh that feels like she’s been holding onto for months, and she whispers against your lips, “I missed you.”

You laugh a little, because there hasn’t been a single day you haven’t seen her, but you tell her “I missed you, too,” because you have. You wrap your arms around her tighter, pull her in so she’s snug in your neck, and you’re tangled together, and you rest like that for a while, your bodies still thrumming, until she kisses you again a little bit later, rolls over slightly to glance over at her alarm clock, then turns back to you with a little half smirk, half pout, as she tells you, as she traces the skin of your waist, that you still have a little over an hour until you have to be up.

You feel your smile grow at the thought of what you know Jamie can do with an hour, and she pushes you onto your back again and straddles you with a wicked little grin, and tells you ‘the rest of the morning is for you.’

She’s building you up for the fourth time, taking her time between your legs, when her alarm clock goes off, and you smash it so hard a button pops off and rolls somewhere that will never be found no matter how hard you look for it.

You’re thirty minutes late to work, but the glint in Jamie’s eyes when you look down at her, when she slips two fingers into you and you pull against her hair, you can feel her smiling against you, and she carries you over the edge in the way that you know she loves the most, it’s so fucking worth it.

//

Later that day in the shop, Jamie is all but dead to the world. You find her in the back room on the couch, laying down with Luna asleep on her chest, eyes closed and rubbing your baby’s back, on a “5 minute break” that she took 30 minutes ago.

“What’s the matter? Didn’t sleep last night?”

She turns her head and opens one eye to look at you as you walk over to the desk to grab what you came in here for, quirks her eyebrow with a little smirk to match yours. “Yeah, was up all night. Tossin’ and turnin’.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“Sure fuckin’ hope so.” She settles back into her snuggle on the couch. “Was some of my best work.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“Had to make up for lost time.”

“You did so, magnificently.”

“Thank you very much.”

“You want me to take her?”

“Nah, I’ve got her. I’ll be back out in 5.”

“Okay. See you in a half hour.”

“Don’t be rude to me.”

“Just saying...you deserve your rest.” You lean over and kiss her as she laughs.

“Yeah, I think I’ve earned it.”

“You definitely did. I have to get you back.”

“Immensely looking forward to that. But for the love of god, I need at least a full night's rest before then.”

//

You bring Luna to work with you almost every day you go in now. Both you and Jamie take one day a week to be home with her, but she’s well behaved, and your customers love her, so you have a little playpen set up for her in the back room, and one of you is always watching her, or holding her, or clutching her hands above her head as she takes wobbly steps through the jungles of your aisles, or pulling the petals she grabs and decides are snacks from her hands and her mouth.

It’s a slow December morning, there’s a snow storm on it’s way and your foot traffic is usually a bit slower when there’s severe weather coming. Your shop smells like pine and balsam, and Luna is almost eight months old now, making lots of gurgling sounds and unattached syllables that will turn to words entirely too soon for your liking, and she has two little teeth she’ll dig into anything she can grab. Jamie has her snug on her hip, walking through the shop with her as Luna points to whatever plant or flower strikes her fancy and Jamie pulls each one down and explains to her what it is. You’re behind the counter, getting ahead on some paperwork, listening to them because it’s your favorite sound, when the phone rings.

You answer it in your usual chipper ‘Leafling, this is Dani’, and whoever it is on the other end is stumbling through words in an accent you know well, asking nervously if a woman named Jamie Taylor works there. This feeling rises in your chest, it zaps your spine and makes you sit up straight, and you don’t know if you feel hot or cold, because you know who this is before he even says it.

You tell him to hold on a moment, that you’re going to check to see if she’s available, in the best professional voice you can muster, but you hear that old shaky, clipped anxiousness coming through anyway, and Jamie is looking at you curiously as you walk toward her, really unsure how you should be feeling, and senses your shift, asks “What’s wrong?”

“Man on the phone for you…” She gives you a strange look as she makes her way toward the desk, and you call after her, tell her, “Said his name is Michael...Jamie...Jamie, it’s Mikey.”

She freezes in her path, and snaps her head around to look back at you, eyes sharp, disbelieving, and Luna is reaching for a begonia, tugging its leaves, and Jamie catches it as it tumbles off the shelf before it hits the floor, clutching Luna’s hand in hers so she can’t grab anything else that will crash to the ground. Jamie looks back to you, her eyebrow furrowed, and you don’t think you’ve ever seen her look this lost.

You walk toward her, tell her, “You don’t have to, you know, if you don’t want to. I can get his number and you can call him back when you want.”

She’s shaking her head, still a little thrown by the shock of it, asks, “You sure it’s him? He said?”

“Yeah. I’m sure.”

She rubs her hand against the back of Luna’s head, kisses her on the forehead so sweetly before passing her over to you. She kisses you on the lips, whispers, “Love you,” and you say it back, then she disappears into the back room, taking the phone with her.

She’s gone for almost 45 minutes, and only two of your regulars pop in to grab some flowers for their Sunday dinners they’ll likely be stranded inside for. Luna’s getting a little fussy without any of her toys to distract her, but you know she’s just tired, so you grab her blanket and her pacifier from the counter and sit with her in the armchair by the front window that you put there when you started bringing her to the shop with you more often. It’s a lovely little spot, you have a perfect sight of where Jamie usually works at the counter, and a nice view down the street. You would sit here and feed Luna, and people watch, and have a cup of coffee in the mornings, and now you sit here as you rub her back as she falls asleep, warm and cuddly against your chest, and you watch the snow fall and everything is quiet.

Eventually, the door to the back room opens and you look over as Jamie comes out, eyes finding yours immediately, and she smiles, a little wet thing, her eyes red, but not entirely sad. And even though your chest aches to see Jamie like this, she is so beautiful after she cries. Maybe it’s a little cliche, but it does something magnificent to her face, to her eyes, to her skin that just knocks you right over and you can’t believe how lucky you are that your gaze is the first thing she searches for after she comes out of that room.

She drifts over to you and sits down on the small table next to the chair, and she places her hand on your thigh, her fingers coming up to rub Luna’s chunky little leg, and you stare out the window together for a while before she speaks.

“He’s, um…” she takes her hand back, rubs her palms over her eyes and her cheeks, and you know when she does this her eyes are prickling with fresh tears, even if she feels like she’s shed enough. “He’s really good.” She’s looking at you like she can’t quite believe it, like she never expected such a thing could be possible, that even if it was, that she’d ever know.

With a kiss to your temple, she promises to tell you everything later, and you know Jamie, and you know she needs a few hours to digest it all before she can churn it out again, but you would wait as long as she needs. It’s agonizing, and euphoric, and complicated, and sore, and beautiful all at once and all so suddenly for her. And Jamie is an absolutely wonderful mother to Luna, you can tell she’s surprised by it at times, just how good she is, but every so often you still see the echoes of her childhood ricochet through, when you remember how new you are at this, how most of the time you’re just flying blind because you don’t have any of the answers or anyone who does, you still see what that small version of her thought of as failures, as shortcomings, rake through her confidence like a rusty old nail.

When you get home a couple hours later, Jamie says without words that she’s putting Luna to bed that night. She gives her a bath while you make dinner and reads book after book to her in the rocking chair in her room until she’s completely asleep, and even then she holds her close for a while. You see them through the cracked open door when you walk past Luna’s room to get to yours to change into something more comfortable, but you don’t push her. She comes out when she’s ready, and when she walks into the living room, having just changed into her sweatpants and a hoodie, you pull her into your arms and let her rest there for a little while before she laughs at seeing the hefty glass of wine you poured her on the kitchen island.

She talks, for hours, until sleep starts coating her voice, and you listen. She tells you all about him, everything she learned, everything she’s been remembering over the last couple of hours since their conversation.

When he was seven, shortly after the last time she saw him, he was sent to a family in Birmingham, and he was officially adopted when he was eleven, which is something Jamie knew but couldn’t say for certain when it happened. He has two younger sisters. He’d gone to university, and studied marine life. He first tried to find her then, about six years ago, but the farthest he got was a social worker saying the last they had on her was that she aged out of the system, but that they did find a record of her release from prison. He was honest, said he didn’t look anymore after learning that, not for a while. He thought that if that’s the kind of person she turned out to be, then maybe it was best they keep their separate ways. He moved to San Diego for a summer job that turned into a year-long project that turned into meeting a woman and falling in love. He’s twenty-six now, he’s getting married in the spring. He still goes home to see his parents every Christmas, and they come see him every summer.

But he still remembered his sister Jamie, who always gave him extra cherries on his ice cream, who always said yes when he asked if she wanted to play catch outside, who would spend hours with him turning over the rocks in the woods by the creek and poking at all the bugs and worms and little fishes they’d find, putting the most interesting ones into cups so they wouldn’t slip away.

He put in some more effort this time, and managed to find a local newspaper article from about a year and a half back about an elementary school garden that The Leafling had helped sponsor. There was a photo of you and Jamie with about fifty third graders next to a write up about the school and their new green program, and a short interview with you and Jamie that mentioned she hailed from England. He said she looked so happy in the photo, still with that messy curly brown hair and he knew, for certain, it was her, but when he found the number for the shop, he still sat on it for about a month before calling.

Jamie tells you she told him some things too. About London, about the prison time, about finding exactly what she needed with her hands buried in soil. Her first job at a landscape company after she got out, being recommended to work at Bly. She told him about you, that you worked together there and got on, and decided to move to the States and start a shop of your own, but she didn’t say much more, though she got the sense he knew it was deeper than that, but didn’t push. She didn’t tell him about Luna, because he might have been her baby brother, but she barely knows this man, doesn’t know if she can trust him yet, and protecting her family will always be first.

But she tells you that he still lives in California, and he’s passing through the east coast on his way back from England after the holidays, and wanted to know if he could see her. He said he would understand if that was too much, too soon, that he doesn’t really know if there’s a right way to go about this kind of thing, but Jamie said she would think about it and let him know by next week before he flies out.

You can tell she doesn’t have her answer, and you tell her that it’s okay not to know, not to have an immediate impulse to say yes. That she doesn’t have to feel guilty if she wants to wait longer, that he would understand. She nods, and even though she doesn’t know her answer yet, you do. You know what she will decide, you know what she needs, even if it scares her, even if it digs up things she thought she buried deep enough to burn. Even if she needs to curl up into you to feel safe while she figures it all out for herself, like she does when you get into bed that night and she tugs your arms around her. You kiss her shoulder and pull her close as you settle in behind her, and she clasps her hand with yours and brings it up to kiss your knuckles and keep you near, and you drift off holding her tight.

//

Jamie tells you four days later she wants to meet him. She’d been quiet the last few days, lost in her thoughts a bit more than usual since that day he called, and you pull her close when she tells you.

“What if he’s awful.” You barely hear it, muffled into your neck.

“Well...I already know I got the best Taylor.”

She pulls back, laughing a little, shaking her head and she kisses you. “Works out well, ‘cause I’ve got the best Clayton.”

“It’s a low bar.”

//

It’s Luna’s first Christmas tomorrow, and while neither you nor Jamie are particularly religious, you do love this tree, and the presents, and the baked goods, and the smells and sounds and joys of it. And now that you have Luna, you fucking love being Santa Claus, even though Luna has no concept of what wrapping paper even is yet, let alone a jolly magic man with presents and reindeer, but this year is more for you that it is for her anyway, so you let yourself have it, as fully as you want.

Jamie started color coding which tapes are safe for Luna to watch when she is older but still young, and which ones are for you that will be kept separate, away from her. The ones with red writing on them contain nights like this. You, drunk , on Christmas Eve loading up the bottom of the tree and going on about how much fun you are having and how delicious this cocktail Owen gave you the recipe for is.

Jamie is trying so poorly to contain her laughter, because you are on your stomach, pushing presents under the tree that you stubbornly kept hidden in the linen closet, for what reason you have no idea, it’s not like she would find them, and your glass of holiday cheer is on the floor next to you. You’re talking to the camera, to Jamie, and somehow you started this very long winded speech to future-Luna, telling her just how thrilled you are even though she will have absolutely no idea that tomorrow morning is any different from any other fucking day, but still, you are excited and you will kiss her teeny little nose and put her in a Santa hat and you will give her a cookie.

Your mother had mailed a few presents, several for Luna, and one for you and Jamie. You had mailed her some more photos of Luna from the last time you sent her some, and you know she likes them, not because she tells you that she does, but because when she calls you, every few weeks now, she says that the ladies she plays canasta with tell her that Luna is really a very cute baby, and several of them have ugly grandchildren, and they tell her that Luna is by far the cutest. It’s strangely the highest praise you have ever gotten from your mother.

The next morning, Luna is mostly interested in all the paper she gets to rip and the little xylophone piano she is happily clinking away on all morning, and she is not happy about the dress you put her in for the dinner you were invited to, so you just stick her in some red stretchy pants and green sweater and call it a day.

//

Jamie made plans to meet Mikey during the second week of January, and as excited as she’s told you she is about it, she’s trying to figure out what to wear right now and your bedroom is covered with clothes she’s pulled off hangers and from drawers and you haven’t seen her this nervous in a very long time.

You walked into your room and she had looked up at you, standing there in a bra and a pair of black jeans looking absolutely lost.

They aren’t meeting anywhere fancy, just a restaurant nearby that you frequent that she can walk to. And Jamie, who always seemed to float into the day in whatever clothes made her feel most comfortable, made her feel most relaxed, most herself, is finding everything she owns doesn’t fit right, or doesn’t feel right, doesn’t look good. You don’t tell her this, because it’s not about that, but you can’t imagine he would care what she was wearing.

You help her pick a top she doesn’t frown at when you slip it over her head, pair it with simple earrings and her silver chain, and tell her that she looks beautiful, because she does. Her hair is down, her curls a little messy from all the changing, but it’s perfect, and you hold her old green jacket open for her by the door and hug her from behind when she slips her arms through, before she turns to face you and holds you there, close, for a minute, gathering her last bits of strength from your skin before she kisses you and walks out the door.

Luna is already down for the night, so you put on the radio and get to all the chores you’d been ignoring all week, and you put away all the Christmas decorations, which isn’t much since you got rid of the tree last week, and you tackle the two days of dirty dishes, you wash all your towels, and you clean Weed’s food bowl and feed him some treats and give him some much needed attention because he’s still your favorite boy.

It’s barely 10:30 when you finish everything that really needed to get done, and you could go to sleep, or you could wait up, because Jamie will be back soon, you’re sure. So you make a perfectly fine cup of tea that you know Jamie would still scoff at, which you think is more of a running tease than an actual judgement at this point, and you put on the television to pass the time as you wait for her. You must drift off though, because you’re woken by the soft click of the front door and a sharp crick in your neck from how you are laying on the couch, and Jamie is shrugging off her coat and you look at the time on the cable box and it’s almost midnight, and Jamie is smiling and walking over to you.

“How was it?”

She cups her hands around your face and leans down and kisses you. She’s smiling wide, eyes bright, says, “It was great.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me.”

“Now? Or in the morning? You fall asleep?”

“No, I’m up, tell me.”

She barely gets through ten minutes before you feel your body fighting against your will to stay awake, your eyes drooping and your head heavy against your hand, and she’s laughing softly at the state of you, patting your lap and pulling at your limbs, tugging you toward your bedroom before you can even form a coherent protest.

She helps you into your pajamas, and even though you both know you could do it on your own, you let her slip your sleep shirt on because the way she’s touching you makes your chest buzz, the way she’s looking at you and the way she’s smiling so easily, so fresh, when she pulls your hair out of your shirt makes you tug her down to kiss you, because you love Jamie so much, but you love her most of all when she is happy. She tells you that you look beautiful, and you laugh because you realize you did the exact same thing for her earlier this evening.

She falls asleep holding you, and when you wake up, she’s playing with Luna on the rug in the living room. It’s her day to stay home with her, and she’s already made a pot of coffee for you, and you pour yourself a mug and sit on the little window seat with your legs crossed, Weed curling up next to you for some head scratches, and she tells you as much as she can before you have to get your day started and head out for the shop.

He’s funny, and blunt but in a way that’s a little more free than she is, and he has a full beard but she knew it was him right away from the way he looked around a room to find her, and he’s been a big brother for so long now that he has these instincts she’s unfamiliar with, things that made Jamie feel taken care of by someone in a way that she never felt in her life.

She was planning to tell him about you anyway, once she got a better sense of him, but he beat her to it when he asked about the ring on her finger and asked if it was you. She showed him the picture she keeps in her wallet of you and Luna, and Jamie tells you it was the first time she took a step back and felt like she really had a handle on all of this, like she hadn’t realized just how secure it in she was until he looked up at her from across the table, holding a photo of her family, curious with a look of admiration she’d long since forgotten used to shine up at her from his little face, a man but still a boy, still her baby brother, asking her so genuinely what it’s like to be a parent.

They decided they would make a point to call one another once a month. There was still so much to say, so much to unpack and to learn, and Jamie looks calm, looks sure, when she tells you she wants him in her life.

Luna’s standing next to Jamie, holding onto her shoulder as her little legs wobble, and she’s been taking tentative steps for weeks now and you and Jamie have been waiting for the moment she’ll start walking and you both look over to her and you think this is going to be it, you are both holding your breath, but she looks over to you, and then back to Jamie, and then just plops back down to the floor and straight up laughs at the two of you.

“Oh, you fucking tease.”

“She gets that from you.”

You finish the last sip of your coffee and you scoop Luna up from the floor and put her in her high chair, tell Jamie to push her back down if she thinks she’s going to start walking when you’re at work today because you want to be here to see it.

//

It’s Luna’s first birthday next week, and you have a small party planned with your friends. Owen flies in, and even though Jamie tried to tell him he didn’t have to weeks ago on the phone, he makes all the food for the party. You are so glad Jamie couldn’t talk him out of it, because everything is ridiculously delicious and you missed his cooking almost as much as you missed him.

He makes Luna a tiny version of her actual cake that she gets to eat with her hands, and while it does turn out to be an absolute mess, just as expected, she’s delighted when she leans forward into it and starts just eating it with her face. Jamie gets the whole thing on video, and you can’t quite believe it’s been a whole year that she’s been here. Can’t believe it’s been a year knowing Jamie in this whole new way. Can’t quite believe she’s already so big, that she's grown into this funny, happy child with a whole personality since you brought her home a year ago when she was so small, the tiny little thing that made you a family.

Your mother comes into town for a few days for the party, even though you told her she didn’t have to, and she buys Luna a little wooden tricycle that she starts riding all around your apartment. She runs over Jamie’s toes with it three times before Jamie shoves it into a closet and says it’s time to start looking to move.

Mikey sends Luna a stuffed whale that’s almost the size of her entire body, and she is obsessed with it. It quickly becomes her favorite stuffed animal and she can not sleep without it, and doesn’t leave the house unless it’s snug in her stroller with her and she’s walking everywhere now and she tugs it behind her by its tail all over your apartment, its white belly getting steadily grey until you are forced to wash it.

The day after the party, you find Luna sandwiched between her two fluffy companions, curled up around her whale on the rug in your living room, Weed snuggled against her on the other side, knocked out for an early nap with some cartoon playing on your television. You had plans to take her to the zoo, but it’s unseasonably hot out today and just a bit too muggy and cloudy for your liking, so you decide to just let her sleep on the floor, blast the AC, you finally finish reading the book you started while you were pregnant with her, and have not had the time to finish.

//

Before your mother heads back home, she tells you she wants to have lunch with just you, and you realize it’s the first time you have been alone with her since you left Iowa over seven years ago.

You had watched her at the party a couple of days ago, in a way you have never been able to, because for the first time her gaze was not fixed on finding all your flaws, and for the first time, you were not trying to conceal anything. You watched her take it in, chat kindly with your friends, move around your apartment and weave her body between all the love you’ve created, trying to figure out how she belongs in it, and you think she was surprised by all of it. And you can’t be sure, but you think it made her a little sad to realize how much she underestimated you.

You get a table somewhere outside at a restaurant near a park and it’s quiet, the breeze gentle and the sun warm and your mother is looking more thoughtful right now than you think you have ever seen her. She doesn't look at you, she stares off into a point in the distance, fumbles with her bracelet, swishes her cocktail around in the tumbler, as she gets through everything she needs to say.

She opens up to you in a way you think, maybe, she’s been thinking about for a long time, but hasn’t quite been able to find the words. Hasn’t quite been able to find the confidence, or the need.

It’s not everything, but it’s not excuses, because you both know there would never be any good enough to justify how she treated you all those years ago, when all you needed was someone who would love you steadily when the world you built around you with rotten wood and rusty nails inevitably came tumbling down.

She tells you about your dad, in a way she hasn’t in decades, without bitterness. She tells you what it was like then, when you were small, and it was the three of you. How seeing you with Jamie and Luna makes her remember what a good man he was and how much he loved you, and how somewhere along the line, she let his death poison whatever legacy she could have salvaged of him. She let whatever desire she had to parent you die with him, and it’s her biggest regret, not being enough without him, not being anything at all.

You can tell she isn’t comfortable being this vulnerable and that there’s more she could say that she won’t, and that’s okay. It feels like you have just jumped a chasm, and somehow, made it to the other side. You don’t reach out to touch her, but do you thank her for telling you.

She does mention, later, that Judy still asks about you whenever they run into each other, and you’re not exactly surprised, because Judy was always more of a mother to you than Karen ever was, and over the years you’ve thought about picking up the phone to call her more times than you have Karen. You realized some time ago, that even though you are so safe and so secure in your life, you are still scared of disappointing her, still scared that if you ever called her up, she would blame you for wasting all those years of her son’s life with a lie. You are so afraid she would resent you for it, and that fear grew to months, grew to years, grew to this feeling deep in your chest that felt hollow, felt like ‘too long’ and ‘missed my chance’ and ‘better to not at all.’

But your mother is looking at you now when she tells you this, when she tells you that the last time she saw Judy, about a month ago, that she told her how well you seem, told her about Jamie, about Luna, about your shop, showed her the pictures you’d sent her of it all and shared the stories you told her. And she tells you, with a gentleness that could make you cry, that Judy wants you to know that she always just wanted you to be happy. She says it with such care, with the acceptance and knowledge of a woman who wasn’t capable of something so simple when you needed it most.

You finish your lunch, and you hug her goodbye and she puts her arms around you and you let yourself fit into her in a way that you haven't tried to since you were small, and she squeezes you tight and she kisses you on the cheek and tells you she will call when she lands.

When you get home, Jamie is chasing Luna around the apartment to try and get a spatula out of her hand that she swiped from the kitchen and is whacking all over your walls. It’s loud, and your apartment is a disaster, and Luna is screaming but in that way that tells you she’s having a good time, and Jamie is trying to sound firm but it’s just not working. When you walk into this mess, Luna runs to you and starts hitting you with the spatula and Jamie finally snatches it out of her hands, mutters something that sounds like ‘little fucking menace’, and she kisses you hello.

She asks how your lunch went, and you tell her it was good. You’ll tell her more later, but right now Luna is stretching her arms up to you, so you pick her up and hold her for as long as she lets you, because one day she will be too big for your arms to carry, and you’ll be able to hold her in different ways, new ways, wonderful ways, but you want as much of this as you can get while you still can.

//

The social worker calls you on a Monday afternoon in July while you’re home with Luna to let you know that your case was approved, and that you can set a date for the adoption.

Jamie cries when you tell her when she gets home from the shop later that day, and you realize, as you squeeze her tight, her hands still covering her face as she weeps, that this is the first time big, messy, complicated systems have ever given her anything good.

You’re in your kitchen, in almost the exact same spot where you told her you were pregnant almost two years ago, and so much has changed since that day, so much better, so much different, but not the way it feels to hold Jamie, not the way you fit into her shape as you kiss the crook of her neck and she shifts her arms around you. Not the way you love how she laughs when she’s so happy like this, wet and shocked and a little disbelieving, but mostly just elated and relieved.

You take Luna out for ice cream the next day, and even though she doesn’t have a clue why you’re there or what you’re celebrating, she senses that you and Jamie are both very happy and so she is happy too, and she enjoys her vanilla ice cream with rainbow sprinkles so much that it gets all over her face and the front of her little sunflower dress.

Jamie is cleaning up Luna’s sticky hands and mouth, and you’re watching them, and Luna looks right at Jamie and one of her clean hands comes up to squeeze Jamie’s nose and pull at her loose curls as she squeals in delight and Jamie laughs, and you love them.

You never imagined this would be you, at least not like this. Not this happy in it, this comfortable, and you don’t want to be anywhere but next to these two. Back when you were walking through your life like a ghost, you thought you could bear this, with Eddie. You thought you had to, so you would get through it if you allowed yourself to feel nothing, if you let yourself disappear deep in the mirage of it. You can’t imagine feeling that empty ever again. You can’t imagine waiting for something this good to feel right, and it makes you want to cry, to think there was a version of you that was not brave, that walked into a life you didn’t desire, with someone you didn’t want, and you think of that lost woman, that poor child of hers, who got so much less than half of who you are now.

Luna will only ever get the truth, will only ever get you whole, and she deserves nothing less than that, and you know that you deserve nothing less either.

//

You pick a date in November. It was the soonest they could schedule your hearing, and when you mark it on your calendar, with a little sticker of a smiling yellow sun that Luna put on the little square, four months seems so far away. You think the days, weeks, months, will skip along, but they drag on, and not just because the anticipation of it makes time move like glue.

Work has been grueling lately with you and Jamie starting on plans to expand the business, and you're looking to move soon because the end of your lease is approaching, and it feels like everything you’ve been building toward the last two years is all happening at the same time and it’s wearing you down.

Everything for the business is time sensitive, and everything for the adoption is so emotional, and you and Jamie have been looking at houses any spare afternoon you get and she always finds something wrong with the ones you love, and your skin feels itchy and everything is aggravating you lately. You haven’t exactly been very nice to Jamie this week, and she doesn’t deserve you being short with her and you tell her you’re sorry but there’s so much to do and it’s not like she has time either. But she can always tell when you’re being overworked and worn thin, and she's always been so much better than you at putting the brakes on, at taking a step back, at carving out a little time to breathe and recalibrate.

So when she leans against the kitchen island, reaches her hand over to cover your clenched fist, easing your fingers apart, and gently asks, “You want to talk to me?” you feel the sharp pressure of tears behind your eyes, and you throw your pen down more forcefully than exactly necessary, but it feels good to be a little petulant. You close your eyes, rest your head in your hands and you feel the tears spilling against your palms before you even registered you were crying, your chest cracking with the pressure, shaking and shuddering, and you don’t think you realized how overwhelmed you were until right now, and Jamie comes around to stand next to you, places her hand on your shoulder, whispers “Oh, love,” and pushes the paperwork away slightly and swivels your stool to face her.

“I’m just so exhausted.”

“I know.”

“And everything that is happening right now, it’s all good but it doesn’t feel good, it feels stressful, and there’s so much fucking paperwork .”

Jamie is nodding, and her hand is on your thigh, tracing gentle reassurances.

“I just...I want it to feel happy. Because it’s all exciting, it is, it’s all so wonderful. But I don’t even have the time to feel it, because every spare minute I have is filled with all this. ” You gesture exasperatedly to the sprawling mess of documents for your accountant on the table, and everything from your real estate agent is stacked high on the other side of the counter, and your sink is filled with four days of dirty dishes, and Luna’s blocks are all over your rug threatening to be tripped over, and everything just keeps piling up and there isn’t enough time in the day. You feel fresh tears spill from your eyes and then Jamie is pulling you in, and you’re getting the collar of her shirt wet, but she holds you there firmly, kissing the side of your head and tracing her hands up your back, whispering sweet things to you that you try to let yourself believe because Jamie has never lied to you.

She pulls back after a while, after you’ve let out most of it, asks you, “What needs to be done tonight? What’s urgent?”

“This needs to be dropped off to the accountant tomorrow. I was going to go before work, but I can probably go during lunch on my way to that open house.”

“Okay.” She stands up straight, in the way that tells you she has a plan, the way you know there are steps you can follow that will lead you to safety. “Here’s what’s gonna happen.” She pulls your neglected glass of water closer to you. “First, you’re gonna drink this, because all your body’s water is now on my shirt.” She’s smirking and you can’t help but laugh a little, still wet, but it knocks something loose in your chest and you nod and take sips while she continues.

“Second, I’m gonna go run you a bath. Should take about twenty minutes to fill up. You think you can continue working on this until then?” You nod, so she goes on. “Whatever you don’t get done by then, we finish together tomorrow morning. If it’s not done in twenty minutes, it's tomorrow’s problem, alright?”

You nod, whisper, “Okay,” and she tucks your hair behind your ears and pulls you in to kiss you.

“And I’ll clean up the mess our daughter left in the living room so neither of us break a foot. And maybe do these dishes before a new ecosystem evolves.”

You laugh, glance over to the disaster on the rug, and really, you didn’t even know you owned that many blocks. You look back at Jamie, who’s still looking at you with concern and so much love and you ask, “You joining me?”

“Hm?”

“In the bath, are you joining me?”

You can tell she hadn’t intended to, that this was only for you, but that little surprised smirk paints her lips, her eyebrows quirking and she asks, “You want me to?”

You’re still not sure how after all this time, how in the middle of a melt down juggling three big life events with her, you still can feel shy like this, nervous like this. How you can still feel right back there in the greenhouse, with a crush and all of one kiss under your belt, offering her bad coffee and a fresh start, hoping she’ll say yes.

“Yeah, I want you to.”

She shakes her head, laughs a little, says, “Okay, then. Anything you want.”

It’s so much easier to turn back to all these numbers on the table before you, especially with the image of Jamie’s face dancing in your mind when you call after her, ask, “Anything I want? Is that a promise?”

It turns out it is, and Jamie gives you everything you ask for and more with your back pressed tightly to her front and her lips on your neck and your fingers threaded through her hair. Your head falls back to her shoulder as she builds you up so slowly, her hands everywhere and taking their time. You dig your nails into her thigh when she speeds up her thrusts just slightly but it’s just what you need, your moans and pants and the moving water echoing off the tile and slamming back into your senses, and she kisses you as she releases that last bit of tension from your bones.

You turn in her arms when you’re nothing but liquid, and you kiss her and push your body into hers. She wraps her legs around you and she grabs on to the ledge of the tub with a gasp when you slip into her with two fingers and she knocks over some of Luna’s bath toys and they tumble into the water. She quickly grabs them and throws them across the room, mumbling something about needing two bathrooms when you move, both of you laughing and hers turns into a moan against your lips when you push into her further and curl and bite down on her bottom lip, and you’ve already spilled a fair bit of water onto the floor this evening, but you don’t really care. Right now, you only care how Jamie’s nails are digging into your back, how she feels around your fingers, how the skin of her neck tastes so clean and so warm and like home, how she sounds when your thumb comes up to work circles on her clit and how she holds you close as she comes undone.

You sleep so deeply that night, and when Jamie wakes you in the morning with a kiss and a fresh cup of tea on your bedside table, she tells you she let you sleep and she finished the paperwork.

//

You haven’t had many opportunities to look for new places to live in your life where you really got to take your time and look for what you wanted, and you realize that you love looking at houses. Jamie hates it even though she has lots of opinions, but she loves you, so she makes it work. You look at so many, and in each one you find something to fall in love with, and Jamie finds something to hate.

But your common ground is that you both always loved older homes, you always loved quirks and oddities and rooms that were not quite square. You visit a house that checks all your boxes and is in your budget, that has a small porch and a backyard and a basement, three bathrooms and two huge tubs, and the thought of finally having a dishwasher makes you want to weep with joy. It has years of stories in its walls, and Jamie was always good at fixing things, but she’s always loved making them her own, and you see the look in her eye when you walk through the halls and watch her hand trail along everything it touches with a dream.

You move in late October, and leaving your apartment is harder for you than you thought it would be. You have only ever left places in a sprint, in a cold sweat, only ever running away and never toward, and it’s something entirely new and your body feels joy and sadness all at once because you feel so safe here, and this was the first place where you ever really felt like that. This was the first place that ever really felt yours.

You’ve been here with Jamie for six years, filled this space with so much as you grew into new and different people and created an entirely new one. It’s strange, to see the place you called home for so long be so empty and bare, and yet have all of your memories fill the space in bright, vibrant colors as if they happened yesterday.

Time doesn’t feel linear, with you standing here in your kitchen, placing your keys on the counter before you leave for the last time, with the drawers empty and the walls blank. Time feels like a perfect cup of tea, warm and aromatic, with all of your memories swirling around you like honey and milk and sugar and cinnamon, all of your feelings like vapor in the sunlight, molecules dancing and glorious. You have created so much, loved so much, been so much in this pocket of room in this city, and leaving feels like saying goodbye to a part of yourself, feels like saying goodbye to your first perfect place.

But Jamie is waiting for you downstairs in the car, and you remember the last time you put your hand in hers and asked her to take you home, and how you finally felt like you belonged somewhere. How her fingers linked in yours felt like all of that running away might not have been fleeing at all, how it might just have been you sprinting into her arms, running toward this, the best, most right version of you.

//

Your friends Will and Ben come down from Montreal to help you move. They take Luna off your hands for a few hours while you and Jamie spend some time unpacking boxes with all your fragile items, and then spend some time properly acquainting yourself with the kitchen floor. They know exactly the business you’ve been up to by the state of your hair and Jamie’s less than smooth shirt and the bruise blossoming on her chest that her buttons don’t quite hide, and you don’t correct them when they tease you, and ask which general areas of the kitchen to avoid touching.

They spend a few days here, and they stay in the spare room you have now, and you get mostly everything set up while Jamie goes back into work. The adoption is next week, and you’re planning to sign a lease on a new storefront next month, and you’re in your new house and everything feels fresh, feels good, you’re sitting on your old couch in your new living room with your old friends and you are feeling it all so fully.

You sit with them and you make iced tea while you rest from rearranging the furniture, and they seem to enjoy it so Jamie must just really be dedicated to her bit with you.

Luna is finally big enough to really play with the little kitchen that Owen got her and you have all her toys set up in the living room because she’s still too little to put everything in the basement where you can’t see her playing, and she keeps coming up to the three of you with things she “made”, plastic apples on plates, and spoons and cheese in coffee mugs, and she hands you all teacups and comes over with a tiny coffee pot and dumps air into your cups, and you all pretend to eat and drink everything and enjoy it, and it’s not so much pretend, you realize, when you see the joy in all your eyes, when you feel it so true.

//

You wake up on the morning of the adoption in your new bedroom to Jamie’s back pressed against your front. It’s early, your alarms haven’t gone off yet and the sun is still shy, but she’s awake, her hand tracing patterns on your arm around her waist and you tug her in closer to let her know you’re up. She turns in your arms to meet your eyes and wrap her hands around the back of your neck and she kisses you, slow and so, so tender. She tucks herself into you and circles her arm around your back and you both just breathe in the morning.

A little while later, you hear Luna start to do her little cry scream down the hall that isn’t really because she’s upset or needs anything, just because she’s awake and wants you to know.

Jamie goes to get her and Luna is so delicious when she’s just waking up, all mushy with her eyes blinking heavily and her head resting against Jamie’s shoulder, and she’s sucking on her pacifier and holding onto her little blanket. She’s so snuggly like this and Jamie settles her between the two of you while you all wait for the sun to fully rise, just holding each other and rubbing your baby’s belly and you drift between sleep and wake just like this.

Eventually, Luna gets her energy and starts crawling all over you, and when she starts jumping on the bed, you lift yourself into a sitting position, sleep no longer a possibility, and Jamie gets the camera, and you complain because you probably look disgusting even though Jamie tells you she begs to fucking differ.

But there’s no wrong way to look, you think, when you feel this good. There’s no wrong way to be, when all your love is in one bed.

//

Your mother had insisted on flying in for today, and while you thought at first it would be stressful and overwhelming and not really what you or Jamie wanted for this day, it turns out to be wonderful. She is nothing but love for you, nothing but happiness for you, in whatever way that manifests in Karen Clayton, and you take it because she has never given you this part of her before.

Owen flies in too, and it’s so nice to have the two of them on either side of you, while Jamie holds Luna, tall and proud and hers, in front of a judge who at the end of it all, declares what you knew all along was true, as recognized.

And you think, as you kiss Jamie’s cheek through your tears, as she clutches Luna near, her whole world pressed close to her chest and breathing the same air in a sigh of relief, about how nice it is, to be seen. How nice it is, to be acknowledged, to be celebrated.

The five of you go out for lunch, and your mother gives you a present she brought for Luna. It’s a gold bracelet, and she tells you it was yours, given to you by your fathers parents when you were baptized. You’re shocked she kept something from when you were so small, especially because you know she moved out of your childhood home a few years ago when she called you to ask if there was anything from your bedroom you might want to have.

She tries to pass it off as casual, when you ask her why she kept it, when she says that she thought you might like it one day if you ever decided to have kids, since it has a delicate little laurel leaf design etched into it, and she knew, as she gestures vaguely toward Jamie, that plants ‘were your thing now’.

You don’t quite know what to say, because you know your relationship with your mother has steadily, strangely, slowly been mending, but she has never quite told you something as thoughtful as this, even if she is trying hard to mask it behind her usual flippancy. At this point, you don’t really know what the use is, her trying to keep up this facade, when she literally flew to be by your side on this incredibly special day for your family. When she brought your daughter a present that she kept for decades specifically because, somehow, she knew she’d want this version of you to be happy.

Jamie must sense that you are speechless and overwhelmed, so she gently takes the bracelet from your hand and tells your mother something in a tone she is comfortable with, and with Luna on her lap, puts it on her fat little wrist. It’s a little big, but your mother just says, ‘Oh, she’ll grow into it.’

You feel whole, like you have ever since you told Eddie you couldn’t marry him, like you always have with Jamie next to you, like you have ever since you found out you were pregnant with Luna and since Jamie placed her in your arms. But now, you feel it when you look at your mother, smiling and making sweet faces at her granddaughter, thumbing the little gold bracelet that a version of her once clipped onto your small wrist, with so much hope and so much care. You think, maybe, some things can not be erased, but with enough love and the right choices, some things can be rewritten.

//

//

Luna finds these dusty boxes of all your old home video tapes you haven’t watched in decades, and figures out how to convert all of them into digital files. She sends them to you and Jamie, and suddenly you’re transported back ten, twenty, twenty five years.

You’re so young, and Jamie has a full head of dark brown curls, and your little baby is in her crib sleeping, is two and chasing a butterfly. She’s throwing a tantrum on your living room floor while you try not to laugh at her in the background. She is five and singing a song for you and Jamie on Mother’s Day about sunshine, she’s having a birthday party at the aquarium. She’s excited on her first plane ride, when you all took a trip to San Diego to meet Jamie’s new niece. She’s seven and getting her ears pierced, and you always loved that you let her decide if and when she wanted to do that, because she looks so brave with her choice, clutching her stuffed whale close, nervous and excited, and it’s captured, that change. When your little girl turned into someone new, someone who made a big decision about her body and followed through with it with pride while Jamie held her hand. She’s in her Spice Girls phase, she’s missing four of her teeth, asking Jamie if she knows any of them because she’s from England, and telling her to recite her favorite lines from the movie because she has the same accent.

It’s not just her though, it’s you too. Quiet moments, full, whole, breathing minutes plucked from the past shining back at you from your computer screen, where you’re sitting at your kitchen table reading the newspaper and sipping coffee next to your four year old who is being interviewed by Jamie about her plans for the day while she eats pancakes and gets syrup everywhere. It’s you icing a cake for Luna’s kindergarten graduation, telling Jamie to check to make sure you have enough paper plates for the little party you’re throwing, muttering about the rain forecast and how you hadn’t planned for everyone to be inside, not even knowing you’re being recorded. It’s you reading Matilda to a seven-year-old Luna on the hammock Jamie hung up between two big trees in the backyard of your new house on a summer day. It’s you, drunk , on Christmas Eve, telling Luna how excited you are about her first Christmas the next morning.

You wondered what Luna meant when she told you to look out while watching these tapes though, when she told you ‘mum was a thirsty bitch’ , but you understand now, because while Jamie captured the sweet moments of you, she also zooms in on your ass more times than you can count.

“I stand by my creative choices.” She says when you laugh at the fifth time on this tape that the camera has done a very gratuitous full pan of your body. “It was 1998, babe! You looked so good in those high waisted shorts.”

And you know you have a wonderful, perfect, beautiful life. You have made sure to pay attention to it every second, because you fought so hard to get it and you decided that you would not waste one minute of it. Watching all of these moments flash before your eyes makes you so happy, and it also makes you sad. But mostly, it makes you feel so incredibly lucky.

All of these women you were, who you are watching on your screen, they are lost to the past.

All of the years of Jamie, tucked away inside her, buried under wrinkles of her beautiful skin.

All of the versions of Luna, at every perfect age even when she was insufferable at twelve, even when she would not stop clinging to your legs at four, they don’t exist anymore, except within her and right here in front of you, lifted like magic from miles of film. You see what has stayed. Her silliness, the shape of her nose, her incredible, unshakeable confidence, the face she makes when she is annoyed, the exact way she says ‘seriously?’.

It hurts to miss them all, all of these women, all of these girls, to see them dancing across your eyes when you used to be able to hold them close to you and kiss their cheeks. They are gone, but you got to love each and every one so well, the best you could have. And the pain is worth it, to have loved them all, to have put in the work and to have had the joy of it. And they are still here with you now, loving you back, this time as you are now, Jamie with her hands on your shoulders and a kiss to your temple, Luna with her endless text messages, counting the days until she comes to visit you on break from school.

And you have grown flowers and trees and herbs. You have grown out of sweaters and beds and your taste in music, and you have grown out of being Santa Claus. But you still have so much more growing to do, and your roots are strong, they are intertwined with Jamie’s, they are deep, and they aren’t finished sprouting new things for you yet. They aren’t finished blooming, and you can’t wait to see what color flower comes next, what type of sapling will emerge. You can’t wait to meet what’s next.

Notes:

special thanks always to megan to reads all my shit even when she's driving for a hundred hours to get a covid shot.

name is from 'little green' by joni mitchell

i'm on tumblr, same name :)