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“Are you in love with me?”
The question takes Dani by surprise. A lot of things have, recently. Namely how her throat feels on fire when Jamie smiles at her. How her stomach fills with a warm heat when Jamie’s fingers brush hers at the dinner table.
The question takes her by surprise, and she doesn’t realise she hasn’t said anything until Jamie is abruptly swallowing the last of her champagne and clearing her throat.
“I-I mean. Not like that.”
Not like that? How else?
Admittedly, Dani’s champagne ridden brain had wondered with a hopeful excitement whether the conversation would ever lead to something similar to this. She and Jamie had shared plenty of nights alone in the kitchen after the children had gone to sleep with one or two bottles of whatever alcohol they fancied, swapping stories and feelings that would never come to the surface any time before midnight.
She had not expected the question to be so abrupt. She also had not expected Jamie’s voice to have some trace of hope in it.
Because, well, she was. Dani had not been willing to admit this to even herself, fighting against her own thoughts until the early hours of the morning until she was convinced she could fall asleep without wishing she was being cradled in Jamie’s capable arms.
She wasn’t quite sure when she’d given in. It could have been last month when she fell down the end of the staircase in the manor and Jamie had carried her all the way to the sofa in front of the fire and waited on her hand and foot for the rest of the night.
Perhaps it was during one of their night time conversations. The one where Jamie, fiercely clutching her glass of red wine as though it was planning on jumping out of her hands, ran her through what it was like to be in prison, only stopping every so often to inject the conversation with enough humour to ensure Dani she wasn’t searching for sympathy.
Or the day last week when the sun had made a rare appearance for the best part of the afternoon and all of them — Jamie and Hannah and Dani and Miles and Owen and Flora — had spread a picnic blanket on the dew-tipped grass and laughed into the late evening.
It doesn’t matter, in the end.
It had happened. At some point.
Dani is standing, before she realises.
Placing her glass down on the table next to them. She expects her hands to shake — they do not.
The clock reads 1:42.
“Dani? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—“
“Shut up.”
Jamie’s face is cupped in her hands before she remembers to blink.
Dani is kneeling, body still and sure on the ground directly in front of Jamie’s chair, and she can’t think of anywhere else she’d rather be, staring up like she was made for the sole purpose to be here on her knees in front of Jamie Taylor.
“Ask me again.”
“Dani, I—“
“Ask me.”
Jamie looks everywhere but her face, following suit with her empty glass.
“Are you in love with me?”
And Dani is lifting herself up on to her knees properly, Jamie’s cheeks still burning her palms. The kiss she presses to Jamie’s lips is the softest, sweetest, warmest thing she has ever experienced and suddenly she never wants to do anything else ever again.
Except— Jamie is standing.
Oh. Oh no.
Jamie is standing, the chair inching backwards with a gentle creak.
Jamie is lifting a hand, placing it above Dani’s elbow where her arms are frantically folded across her chest. When did I do that?
Jamie is sliding the sleeve of Dani’s jumper upwards, slowly, softly.
It’s not quite goosebumps that Dani feels when Jamie runs soft fingers over her bare arm, but rather a sensation akin to how she imagines it would feel to have millions of tiny trees blooming from below her skin, and as Jamie’s hands close around hers, as Jamie’s warm lips press to her jaw, Dani decides there and then she wants Jamie to touch every part of her and make those microscopic saplings spring up all over her skin until she is nothing but an evergreen forest.
“Ask me again.”
“Are you in love with me?”
This time, Dani does not hesitate.
“Yes.”
This time, when their lips meet, space shatters.