The Bee Charmer

by MountainThyme

Summary:

Recently everything Sue says has been causing this flip in Emily’s stomach. She’s not sure how else to describe it. Something akin to suddenly realising you’re several hundred feet up in the air.

 

Or

 

Emily keeps bees, Sue teaches math, and they are in love. That's it, that's the whole plot.

Notes:

You can blame Fannie Flagg for this because I read Fried Green Tomatoes last summer and this has been gnawing at me ever since. And before you say anything, yes I am aware these two take up far too much of my brain space and I'm okay with it thank you very much.

Chapter 1

you're just a bee charmer, idgie threadgoode. that's what you are, a bee charmer

 

25

Fall, Emily thinks, isn’t very aptly named. In late September, when the leaves are just starting to mellow out into pale yellows and dusty oranges, and the hot summer air begins to loosen and crisp a little, the world feels on the edge of something. The cusp of winter. Falling isn’t the right sensation. Autumn is a better word, and she likes it more; ancient, bygone.

She notes it down in her journal. This one was supposed to be specifically for bee-study but, Emily being Emily, poetry has wormed its way in.

Sticking the book in her back pocket, she turns back to her hive. She remembers, from the YouTube video she watched last night, that she’s supposed to use smoke but that feels cruel, somehow. Not that she has any research to back that statement up, although she has read that it’s not used in natural beekeeping. And she likes nature, so what could go wrong?

She’s sure, she thinks, that she can do this her own way. The way the Dickinsons do most things; whatever piques their interest, with minimal preparation and huge amounts of unearned confidence.

She lifts off the top cover and flinches, minimally, when a handful of guard bees fly out to meet her. They buzz around her face, investigating her, and she manages to stay still long enough for them to decide she’s harmless.

See, she thinks to herself. I’m a natural.

She begins removing the frames, one by one, looking for the signs of a healthy hive she noted down earlier from the Beginner’s Guide to Beekeeping video. She spots larvae, and the queen, who she marked with a bright blue dot, the day she brought them home.

Quietly active but she looks so still in the centre of her workers teeming around her. A hoard of working women, Emily thinks smugly. Maybe this is why her dad was so sceptical of her whole bee-keeping idea. There’s not much room for men in a busy hive.

She scans again, looking closer for eggs, though she’s not really sure what they might look like (there was a lot of new information on that instruction video) and after a few minutes she decides it’s fine, and gently places the frame down to begin on the next one, oblivious to the car that’s pulling into her driveway.

The problem with living alone in the middle of nowhere, everyone told her when she bought her new house, was that Emily was unbelievably inobservant. Even when not in the thick of a writing frenzy, she failed to notice even the most obvious, material things unless she explicitly set her mind to looking for them. Anything with permanence seemed to pass her by entirely.

Like, for instance, the woman standing cautiously on her porch, a bottle of wine in hand.

“Emily,” she calls nervously, “what are you doing?”

Emily, disastrously, loses her concentration and looks up.

“Oh hey, Sue! I’m just - oh fuck!”

*

“So, what have we learned?”

Emily winces as Sue removes the third stinger from her arm.

“It’s a process, Sue. A learning curve, I actually think - ”

“Emily,”

“I know, I know. I’ll wear the suit next time.”

Sue grabs her hand and secures it to the cold compress on her forearm, before putting more cream on the glowing red lump on Emily’s face. Sue is at her most Sue-esque at moments like these; fixing Emily’s problems, patching her up before reluctantly letting her tumble onto her next inevitable catastrophe.

“You’re lucky I was here,” she says, packing away her first aid supplies into the emergency kit that Emily knows she keeps in her glove compartment. It’s probably for the best that Sue is like this, she thinks, given the circumstances.

“I owe you a debt of gratitude,” Emily replies, more than a little sarcastic. Sue’s eyes widen and she can’t help that it makes her smirk.

“You could have been allergic!”

“I’m not though,”

“Austin is,” Sue retorts.

“He is? How do you even know that?”

Sue is turning away from her now, beginning to clear away the mess that seems to have spontaneously accumulated in Emily’s kitchen since the last time she was here.

“Last summer? He got stung on that weekend in Vermont and I had to drive him to the emergency room when his arm blew up like a balloon.”

Emily ignores the look of exasperation on Sue’s face. She should have known that. She was, in fact, present for that weekend, although now it’s been mentioned she’s sure Sue told her and Vinnie to stay behind while they went to hospital.

Something about stressing her out even more.

Sue rinses out the four coffee cups scattered around the room with soapy water and stacks them in Emily’s rusting drying rack. It came with the house and, in her opinion, it’s functional and therefore in no need of replacement.

“Put those in the freezer before they thaw out please,” she gestures to the array of tupperware hurriedly placed on the kitchen table, which in all honesty Emily has only just noticed.

“What are they?”

“There’s a whole lasagna, a chicken casserole, and some soup I made too much of.”

A curious warmth settles in her chest at the instruction. For as long as Emily can remember, Sue has functioned in a very specific way in the Dickinson family. She’s always been Austin and Vinnie’s third sibling, the responsible one who takes people to hospital and makes sure they remember their parents’ birthdays. But with Emily it’s different. There’s something begrudging but endlessly forgiving about the way Sue looks after her. This, the latest of countless Sunday night meetings, is really no different from any other; Sue arrives in the early evening, only after finishing her marking and lesson planning for Monday morning. She usually spends the first half an hour cleaning up a mess or dealing with whatever emergency Emily is experiencing that day, and then fills her freezer for the week.

Emily orders take out in return.

She often feels that she lets her friendship with Sue become somewhat one-sided. The problem is Sue is so much more capable, in pretty much every way. Anything Emily tries to do for her inevitably goes wrong - like the time she tried to make dinner for them in college and, instead of arriving home to a delicious home cooked meal, Sue was greeted by the Boston fire department teaching Emily how to set up their new smoke alarm. She’s fallen into a habit over the years of letting Sue take charge, letting her tidy up and keep the chaos contained. And Emily likes it, feeling cared for. More than she probably should.

This Sunday is the same as any other. Except today, Emily is falling in love with Sue.

But maybe falling isn’t the right word.

“How are the bees,” she says, folding up the dish towel and placing it neatly by the sink, “other than viciously attacking you?”

“Y’know, I think they’re okay,” Emily ventures. “I don’t seem to have killed any of them yet, so that’s a plus. Except the ones who stung me.”

Sue smiles at her, her lips a thin line, her arms crossed over her chest.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says, the corners of her mouth tugging upwards.

“You think it’s stupid,” Emily throws her hands up dramatically.

“No, I don’t. It’s good. Most of your interests keep you inside, so I’m actually glad you’re getting fresh air and stuff,” she says, ever practical, ever worrying.

“Why do I feel like there’s a but coming?”

Sue grins now and walks towards her. She looks tired, Emily thinks. She often doesn’t get enough sleep, even on the weekends.

“No buts. I like that you like them.”

A knock sounds at the front door. Sue kisses her quickly on her uninjured cheek, the warmth of it lingering on her skin and Emily almost hooks an arm around her waist to keep her there, but instead Sue herds her out of the kitchen. Their Thai food is here, and that’s Emily’s job.

*

Sue obediently waits for her dinner, under strict orders to sit and do nothing. Emily insists that she’s able to do this without breaking anything, as she does every week, and to her credit, major incidents in the five minutes it takes her to organise everything and carry it over to the couch are rare. She casts her a handful of concerned glances, but Sue doesn’t notice them, not with her eyes closed and her head resting on the back of the couch. Emily thinks for a moment that she might be asleep already, and considers saving the food and covering Sue with a blanket instead, but then she stirs and looks up at her.

“Sorry,” she says sleepily. “Long day.”

Recently everything Sue says has been causing this flip in Emily’s stomach. She’s not sure how else to describe it. Something akin to suddenly realising you’re several hundred feet up in the air. When she told Sue that she was planning on keeping bees, around a month ago now, she had smiled, her chin resting on her hand across the table of a coffee shop, and simply said of course you are. Emily had felt the bottom of her drop out then, totally without warning. That was the first time, when she’d noticed this metallic taste in her mouth, her heart suddenly pumping too much blood around her body, and she’d felt inexplicably full.

If Emily could pick one word to describe the way Sue makes her feel at the moment, it would be nourished.

“Don’t worry,” Emily says fondly, setting down two plates of garlic pork, Sue’s usual, “you can stay over if you want.”

She phrases it as a question, and can’t seem to completely eradicate the nervous quiver in her voice as she asks it. That’s a new thing. The anxiety. They’ve slept in the same bed for so long they already have allocated sides, like a married couple. So, logically, Emily thinks (not that she’s ever been logical), there’s no reason why the thought of having Sue beside her tonight should make her hands clammy. And there’s no reason for the dramatically painful pang of disappointment she feels when Sue predictably says:

“No, I have work in the morning.”

“I think they can last one day without you,” Emily says quietly, before shovelling noodles onto her fork.

“Em, I have classes all day, I can’t just abandon a bunch of teenagers.”

“You can, you just don’t want to.”

Sue lets out a laugh, a short soft hum that seems to hover in the space between them, a substitute for whatever it is that she’s thinking about. Emily can never quite work that out. She reaches for her food, curling her feet up underneath her and Emily would like to keep her here, where she seems the calmest. It would be for Sue’s benefit, she tells herself, though she knows that being away from her all week feels like missing an organ. The vital parts of her, always somewhere else, doing other things. Not in her body, where they ought to be - sustaining her.

“My tenth graders have a trig test tomorrow, and then I have to stay late for a stupid parent teacher conference,” she sighs, pushing rice around her plate. She’s been like this recently, unenthused. And Sue is always enthused about math. In high school, she had helped Emily with her homework. It was algebra that she could never get a hold of, and Sue had talked her through it, finding helpful comparisons between numbers and words. She always said numbers and poetry were like universal languages. You just had to learn to tap into them.

“I think you should quit,” she says simply. She had meant for it to sound supportive but it comes out as more of a demand.

“Emily -”

“I do, I think you should quit and do something you enjoy.”

“I enjoy it,” Sue retorts, defiant.

“Since when? I mean I know you like teaching people about equations and shit, but all that other stuff?”

“What, my job?” She smirks across at her, picking up her wine glass and gazing at her over the rim.

“Yeah. Y’know, all the conferences and the boring stuff.”

“You think it’s all boring,” she pokes Emily’s thigh with her foot, a tantalisingly demure smirk on her face that’s becoming more frequent. A jolt of something travels down her spine. The pulse of a current, alive and hot to the touch, and she clears her throat to distract herself from the burn in her cheeks.

“I just want you to do something you like,” she says, not looking up.

“Well, I do like it. Mostly. Besides,” Sue adds, “we can’t all be beekeepers.”

Her lips soften into the same smile from the coffee shop. Like some kind of private joke between them, but utterly serious. Adoring, almost - a fierce love for the preposterousness of Emily. She has always been a little ridiculous, her current feelings for her life-long best friend being a prime example. She’s not even sure she could pinpoint when it started, when the deep, all-encompassing love she’d felt for Sue since she was eleven years old suddenly became an even deeper, even hungrier kind of love. She knows that one day, the weight of Sue’s hand in hers became essential. That her voice became part of her own being, that wanting Sue was in her DNA.

In her bones.

Emily turns, her body facing Sue’s on the couch, and reaches for her fingertips, passing them through her own.

“Hey,” she begins, trying to steer the conversation to the only thing she’s thought about all weekend. “Did you ever go on that blind date?”

Sue rolls her eyes and hooks her pinkie finger around Emily’s thumb. Emily grips back, reluctant to let it go.

“Yeah, last night. I think Jane just set me up with the only other gay woman she knows.”

“Besides me,” Emily says without thinking. She expects silence, but Sue only laughs quietly.

“Maybe she should give me your number next time,” she muses, leaning forward a little in a way that makes Emily want to climb into her lap.

“That’s. Um. Yeah,” she responds, forcing herself to stay still but something inside of her crawling out of its skin.

“What?” Sue says, another question on the tip of her tongue, sitting just behind her front teeth. She’s holding Emily’s gaze with a curious stare. As if she’s waiting for Emily to say something meaningful, to articulate the humming feeling in her chest and limbs.

“I don’t know. It’d be weird, I guess. If she did that.”

Sue blinks slowly, and this quiet settles over them again. This screaming silence, thick with something Emily can’t find a word for. And that’s her thing, finding the right words. It would be worrying to her if these lulls between them hadn’t become so commonplace recently.

“So. Not good?”

“Hm?”

“The date. Was it not good?”

“Not good.”

She has to stop herself from audibly releasing the breath that’s been trapped in her lungs since the text arrived. She allows herself a subtle deflation, letting her muscles soften. Sue looks up then, and Emily knows that she felt it. They’re fine-tuned into one another, and while Emily can hide something like being desperately in love with her, for a little while at least, pretending she’s not relieved is harder.

But Sue doesn’t say anything, and everything is okay.

 

Emily walks her to her car, as always. Sue stops to look at the dark space in front of her, the almost imperceptible join of the night sky to the land. She breathes out and leans against the door, tugging Emily closer to her by the hand, so their bodies are pressed together.

“I do love it out here,” she whispers.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m glad you bought this shack.”

“Shut up,” she says fondly, poking at the dip in Sue’s waist. The body in her arms turns, bringing the noses close, and Emily steps back, just a fraction. She pulls a jar from behind her and holds it out between them. An offering.

“Here,” she says, “for your herbal teas.”

“Oh, thanks.” Sue takes it and turns it over in her hand, watching the liquid gold catch the moonlight. “Is it from your hives?”

“No I haven’t gotten that far yet,” Emily smiles. “It’s from the guy who sold me my bees.”

“Your bee guy?”

“My bee guy,” she nods.

“That’s so weird,” Sue says, and pulls her into a tight hug. Emily wraps her arms around her torso and nestles herself in it, the way she smells, like the perfume she bought herself as an end of semester reward, the weight of her in Emily’s arms, the steady pace of her breath as she whispers goodnight.

“Put some more lotion on your stings before you go to bed,” she says, squeezing Emily’s fingers in her palm.

Emily nods and lets her go, watching her car pull out of the driveway, with the knowledge she’ll see her next Sunday, if not before, and will feel this aching all over again.

Chapter 2

most people can be around someone and they gradually begin to love them and never know exactly when it happened

 

26

Emily likes the rain. She likes the smell of it, the earthy scent a storm leaves in the air, the crackle in the atmosphere. She likes the sound of it beating out a rhythm on her roof, pink noise lulling her into a sleepy concentrated haze. But she especially likes watching Sue in the rain.

There’s a kind of unbridled pleasure that takes over her. As if the water rinses away all of the things that bind her together, spreading her open.

They run back up to the house, through Emily’s tiny, almost non-existent orchard. They’d been planting new flowers by the hives, a patch of lavender beside already established foxgloves and honeysuckle. A kind of pantry for the bees. Sue had warned her the weather could turn and Emily, optimistic as usual, had said it would be fine.

Sue was right about the rain, but watching her laugh breathlessly as she drags her inside by the hand, Emily doesn’t much care.

“I told you,” she pants, wiping her face dry with her sleeve.

“I know,” Emily says, smiling to herself. “Go find some dry clothes, I’ll make us some coffee.”

Sue squeezes her hand and almost skips through the kitchen and up the stairs. Emily starts the coffee machine and digs out their mugs, always the same, Sue’s the one with a little more weight to it, Emily’s the one with a crack in the surface.

She’s learning to hide it a little better, or at least she thinks she is. She realises that Sue wouldn’t say much if she had noticed. She takes time to process things, not one to make choices without carefully considering them first. In college, she had taken several months to decide on her major. Being Sue, there was so much she was adept at, so many things she would excel in. Math was the simplest, she had said. The one with the most job security when it was time to graduate, if combined with the right minor choices. Emily had breezed through her English lit major, only just aware of the long hours Sue worked because she stayed up writing half the night. She would sneak into the apartment after a late night at the library, only to wake up for an early shift the next morning.

She watches the coffee drip lazily into the jug and finds herself thinking about Sue’s jawline, following the curve of it to her smile, the way it spreads over her features. She’s just about to allow herself to think about her shoulders, a barely-there flash of her collarbones, when she hears her name called from upstairs. As if bound to answer, Emily turns and runs to her without a second thought.

 

“I’m stuck,” Sue giggles, her arms above her head, and her shirt halfway off.

Emily is, for the sixteenth time today, overwhelmed by it. How beautiful she is.

 

“How did you even do that?”

“I don’t know, but my shirt is stuck in my earring.”

She wriggles slightly, trying to free herself, and Emily goes to untangle her, fumbling and tugging too quickly. Sue flinches.

“Ow, that’s my - ”

“Did I hurt you?”

“No, I think you’re good,”

“Okay, hang on,”

“Ow, Em,”

“Sorry,” Emily babbles, finally pulling the shirt over her head, “sorry, are you okay?”

Sue nods, standing in her bra, her hair still dripping wet, and they both go quiet. Emily focuses, as she’s trained herself to do in moments like these, on the mundane parts of Sue. Not that any part of her could really be described as such. But the parts that she sees everyday, the parts that she’s used to and can cope with. Her eyebrows, the precise shape of them and the way they curve sharply at the ends. Her nose, the freckle above her lip. Details of a face she knows so well it might as well be her own.

“What?” Sue says quietly, and Emily realises that, in her deep concentration, she was in fact staring. She also realises that Sue’s hand is on her hip, her fingers moulding themselves over the shape. The intimacy of it rips through her without warning, heat pulsing around her body and she places a hand on top of Sue’s to steady herself.

“Nothing,” she says, meaning everything.

Sue smiles and looks down. Love isn’t a fall, Emily thinks. It’s this. More of a hovering feeling, a suspension over something unknown. She looks wistfully out of the window, the rain cutting against the glass, hammering loudly into their silence.

“Do you remember that time in Boston, when I dragged you outside into that thunderstorm?”

Sue looks up at her again, her hand flattening against the denim of Emily’s jeans. A flash of unreadable recognition in her eyes, the bittersweet hue that colours most of her memories. Her ninth year as an orphan, the day Emily always planned something distracting for.

“You mean the time you gave me the worst cold of my life?”

“It was not that bad,”

“I was in bed for a week.”

Emily has always had a knack for planning things without much forethought. And she did try. She had meant to drive them out to a lake in New Hampshire, and had even been thoughtful enough to hire a canoe for the day in advance. Her usual plan was to distract Sue from herself for long enough that she’d forget why she felt this hollow space in her stomach. The hungry ache of someone without a family. But, true to form, Emily forgot something. On that occasion it had been the weather forecast, correctly predicting a huge storm on the east coast. Sue had ended up shutting herself inside all day instead.

“That was also the time you kissed me,” Sue says quietly, bringing her other hand level with Emily’s hip, fiddling with her belt loop absent-mindedly.

“Hm. I thought it was you who kissed me,” Emily says, doing her best to ignore the pulse that’s starting in her abdomen, like a magnetic pull towards the fingers there.

“Not how I remember it, Dickinson.”

“Maybe.”

In all honesty, Emily doesn’t remember. And actually, looking back, she doesn’t think it matters. All that remains is the ghost of Sue’s mouth on hers, the grip of her fingers permanently indented into her skin. A hand tugging at her shirt, wet from the rain, a sticky sweet residue left behind on her lips ever since.

“Do you think about that?” she asks, clumsily, and Sue holds her gaze, a shift in her features that Emily has only seen once before.

“Sometimes.”

“I mean, enough to have formed pretty deluded ideas about who came onto who,” Emily teases, and Sue tugs at her jeans softly. Her stomach lurches and she balances herself, holding onto Sue’s forearms. Maybe that’s it, the falling. The breath-stopping, heart-twisting swoop in her stomach.

“Shut up. Yes. I think about it.”

“Me too.”

And it takes a stony resolve for her to keep from saying that she thinks of almost nothing else. Nothing seems to cross her mind any more unless it can be linked back to Sue. Sue, who’s tentatively reaching her hands further around Emily’s waist, whose bare torso is inching closer to Emily’s clothed one. And she feels ridiculous - because, of course, she knows Sue’s body almost as intimately as her own. This is a body she has spent years with, has helped to dress or has been dressed by, has curled herself around in the morning, and carried home on her back the night before. It shouldn’t have the ability to disarm her like this. Sue studies Emily’s face, looking anywhere but her eyes, and Emily ducks her head to catch her gaze.

“Are you okay?”

“Mhmm,” she hums, settling her eye line on the freckle beneath Emily’s earlobe.

“You’ve just seemed a little weird lately.”

“Weird?”

“Good weird. Like…giddy. I don’t know if that’s the right word.”

It isn’t. She’s trying not to worry, about her sudden loss of words, her head a vacuum whenever Sue looks at her. She’s quiet, going over Emily’s wrong words in her head, and when she speaks, it takes Emily by surprise.

“Do you ever feel like we’re wasting time?”

“Oh,” Emily says, the vowel escaping her mouth before she knows why, “in what way.”

“Well, us,” Sue says simply, flitting her eyes back up to Emily’s now, so dark she thinks she could sink into them. She manages no response, except a small shrug.

“What are we doing?” Sue asks, not impatiently.

“We’re doing what we’ve always done,” Emily says slowly, frustrated by her own denseness. It must be like talking to a brick wall sometimes. But this is what they’ve always done. They have always danced around it, teetering on the edge of something wilder, something more indulgent. Sue smiles and shifts, and Emily feels their bodies slot together, seamless when Sue’s in control.

“Maybe we should be doing something else. Do you ever think that?”

There’s an edge in her voice, a low and almost decadent quality to it, forbidden fruit. It makes Emily’s chest constrict and heightens her senses, hairs standing on end. Sue is in control now, as she always is, and Emily quickly realises that she’s being held up almost entirely by the arms looped around her waist, her nose creeping closer, and she feels her own head dipping to meet her.

“I guess,” she whispers, as if using her actual voice might fracture it, this moment Sue is holding them in. Emily watches her eyes close, the shadow of a smile still on her lips, and when she breathes out, Emily thinks that this is her breaking point. This is the second that separates them from before, defines this thing that they’ve avoided defining for so long.

“Sue,” she says, almost a question, and Sue nods immediately, minutely, before leaning up to finally kiss her.

If someone had asked Emily, at any given moment over the last few months, what she was thinking about, the answer was invariably this; holding Sue, kissing Sue, breathing Sue, tasting Sue. This was, as it turns out, a very complex subject. Because, even though it was an experience Emily had been granted once before, it was different now, to how she remembered it and imagined it. It was unexpected, and somehow better, painfully better, than Emily had previously known anything could be.

She didn’t know it could feel so good to be pliant beneath somebody, soft to their touch, how nice it feels to be directed. The reckless contentment that’s caused by being pushed gently backwards onto her own bed by someone who loves her.

“Is this okay?”

Sue pauses briefly above her, halfway through removing her shirt, and Emily adores her, quite ridiculously. She loves the look of sudden realisation in her face, her need to be polite and pleasing stopping her so abruptly. She loves the way her hand at her chest has the ability to make this heat coil in her abdomen, hissing and ready to burst. Love is a reaction. A spark to a flame, the tight grip at her hip like pouring gasoline on the already blazing fire in Emily’s chest. She surges forwards with the urgency of someone who might implode if they’re not satisfied immediately, murmuring a response to Sue’s question, barely audible, before biting down gently on her bottom lip.

Sue whimpers, Emily falls further.

Notes:

started a rewatch, can't get them out of my head. So y'know, the usual.

i'm glad people are still wanting stories about these two. this is gonna go on until i a) forget about it [highly likely] b) find a kind of ending [a little less likely] c) get over them [extremely unlikely]

thanks for your nice comments and kudos, they make me do a lil happy dance :)

Chapter 3

now nobody in the whole world knows I can do that but you. i just wanted us to have a secret together, that's all.

 

27

Emily’s fingers shake violently as she tries to light the sixth match. She’s not actually sure that she’s ever been this cold before. The countryside seems to be more extreme, always. Her patch of land makes Amherst look practically urban. But she’s been busy, building her own world here. More hives and more vegetable patches and more love. Her hands falter and the flame fizzles out, and she drops the match on the ground, the snow making it hiss and steam.

“Shit,” she whispers, hyper aware of Sue’s teeth chattering behind her. It wasn’t supposed to snow, but once again, New England’s weather patterns have betrayed her. She shuffles her firewood around, a wholly empty effort because she already knows this isn’t the problem.

“Emily,” Sue says from behind her, straining against the low temperature. “I’m very cold.”

“Me too,” she sighs, and sprinkles some slightly dryer twigs on top of her teepee frame.

“Can we go inside?”

Sue says it with trepidation, and Emily grits her teeth and pulls her hat down over her ears.

“Not yet. I just need to…” she strikes another match, lighting a ball of paper, and watches helplessly as the flame dies down into a low smoulder. “Jesus Christ, why won’t this fucking thing light?”

She sits back on her heels, and throws the dead match into her pile of useless firewood. It was supposed to be nicer than this. Warmer, and less wet, altogether less frustrating. Giving Sue hypothermia was not an intended part of her meticulously planned out date. She hears snow crunching beneath shoes, footsteps getting closer, and a hand settles on her woolly hat.

“I think it’s too damp, Em,” Sue says quietly, curling strands of Emily’s hair around her likely frostbitten fingers.

“It was dry earlier,” Emily pouts. “It wasn’t supposed to snow.”

“But it did,” Sue says simply, matter-of-fact to Emily’s hopeful delusion.

“Yeah.”

She sighs heavily and pushes herself to her feet, her numb hands finding Sue’s hips, pulling them together for warmth and comfort, and all the other reasons she ever holds her. Sue hooks her arms over Emily’s shoulders and buries her (extremely icy) nose in the crook of her neck. Emily breathes through the cold, because nothing could persuade her to tell Sue to move further away.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbles grumpily. Sue chuckles and burrows further into her, trying to get beneath her skin, into her bones.

“What for?”

“I made a really good plan, and this was not it.”

As is often the way with her romantic endeavours, she had struggled to think practically. She had struggled to keep things low-key because low-key has never really been a part of her vocabulary. Sue always allows for dramatics, for grand gestures, for the pent-up excitement of Emily with an idea.

“I know,” Sue says, raising her head and removing a few stray strands of hair from Emily's lips. “But you try. And that’s all I care about.”

“But I just wanted it to be perfect this time,” she whines, aware that she sounds a little like a five year old. Sue frowns and holds Emily’s face gently in her hands.

“Why?” she asks.

She knows that Sue doesn’t expect it from her. Apart from anything else, Emily has never given anybody the impression that she is perfect. Sue knows her better than anyone, has known her imperfections and loved her anyway, loved her endlessly and without question. But still, she’d like to be able to take her on one date that doesn’t end in disaster.

“Because,” she says sulkily, “I wanted it to be special.”

“It’s special anyway,” Sue says kindly. Emily huffs, frustrated that she can’t articulate herself in front of her sometimes.

“No. I mean - this was the first New Years since high school that you haven’t had to work an extra job somewhere. It’s the first New Years I’ve spent with you in so long, and the first one that we’re…”

She falters, feeling a twist of embarrassment, suddenly self-conscious of the way she loves.

“Together?” Sue supplies, and Emily nods.

There was no fanfare, and no official day. They woke up one day and knew that Sue had not been to her own apartment for a month. That almost all of her clothes were folded neatly into their own drawer in Emily’s bedroom. Their bedroom. That the bookshelf in the study held books that Sue loved, and let Emily borrow, and bought for herself when she felt down, and took out from the library. That their lives were so entangled and inseparable, they were really living one life together. Sue gave notice to her landlord the next day.

“That’s really sweet,” Sue says, brushing her lips against Emily’s cheek. “But aIl I want is to spend it with you. I don’t need everything to be perfect.”

“I know,” she mumbles, defeated, and drops her head to Sue’s shoulder. Sue lowers her arms to Emily’s side and tightens her grip, rocking them slightly, a gentle swaying motion to soothe her.

“Hey, Em?” she says after a few minutes of quiet. “What’s in the hamper?”

Emily looks up, and turns to where Sue gestures, a damp, snow covered basket that she had entirely forgotten about until now.

“Oh crap,” she says. “It’s probably all ruined now.”

Sue smiles and goes to lift the blanket placed on top. She carefully searches through its contents and Emily curses herself for trying to be prepared and putting it out so early, before the snow fell.

“Well, the little cakes are fine. Did you make bread?” she says, holding up a, now soggy, white loaf.

“Yeah,” Emily groans, stuffing her hands in her pockets and giving it a disdainful look. “I was planning on having bread and honey and jam and stuff, and s’mores. Kind of a picnic under the stars.”

Sue stands and takes Emily’s hand, still holding Emily’s well-made but sadly squishy bread.

“You’re cute,” she says, kissing the tip of Emily’s nose. That’s all it takes to pull a smile from her mouth, a grin spreading across her, her eyes crinkling.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Emily leans forward and kisses her, bending their bodies together, and Sue’s hand grips the hood of her jacket, holding on tightly. She still hasn’t quite acclimatised to it; the knowledge that she can kiss Sue at any moment, that as long as they love each other like this Sue’s lips are the only ones she will feel between hers.

“Baby,” Sue shivers, letting a hot breath escape her and warm Emily's skin. “Not to ruin the moment, but can we do this inside?”

Emily kisses her once more, smiling into her, before collecting her hamper and pulling Sue into the house. The house that they share together, she remembers happily.

The kitchen, where they bake another loaf and cover each other in dusty handprints, flour settling in Sue’s hair and on the rise of her cheekbone.

The couch, where they dip chunks of fresh bread into last summer’s honey, and leave sticky sweet marks on each other’s hands.

The fireplace, indoors, where they roast marshmallows and count down to midnight, and wish on the stars they can see from the window.

Notes:

this is so tooth-rottingly (real word? probably not) sweet and i make no apology for it actually. anyway thanks for reading my stupid stories, you are all loved and appreciated as are your delightful little comments!!!

Chapter 4

as happy as anybody who is in love in the summertime can be

28

“Why are you calling me?”

“Oh I’m sorry,” Lavinia chirps sarcastically, “am I disturbing you?”

“Yes, actually.”

Emily sits up, pulling the sheet over her chest. Sue had opened the balcony doors this morning, to let some air in. It’s still early, the breeze clinging to its chill and pulling goosebumps up from her skin. She hears Vinnie hiccup on the end of the line, a tell-tale sign that she’s had a few too many vodka cranberries.

“Great,” she mumbles, “my own sister won’t even talk to me. You’re too busy on your sex-cation -"

“Honeymoon.”

“Ugh. Whatever.”

There’s an indistinct noise, a fumbling, and Emily assumes she’s tripped, or knocked something over.

“Are you good?” she says, her patience slipping further away from her by the second. Sue is in the kitchen, making coffee, being beautiful. Maybe, Emily thinks, her legs are still a little shaky. Maybe her skin is still a little flushed. Maybe she’s still thinking about the ease with which Emily undid her less than ten minutes ago. And here she is, wasting precious time talking to her drunk little sister.

“Yes,” Lavinia huffs.

“Again, what do you want? It’s like two in the morning there.”

“Ugh. I’m just calling because I don’t think I can go feed your bees tomorrow, or whatever.”

Emily stifles a snort. One day, her family will understand what it is she does. So far only Sue has come around to her, frankly, flourishing career as beekeeper by day, poet by night.

“Okay. I don’t need you to feed them, so?”

“Well, whatever it is you want me to do,” she groans. “Why can’t you have cats like a normal person? I know how to take care of those.”

Emily sighs. She had expected this. She and Vinnie have been navigating this slightly codependent sibling relationship for a long time. All three of them, really, are somewhat overly attached to each other. The product of their emotionally stunted and often unavailable parents, each one of them becoming a kind of makeshift parent to the others. If anything she’s impressed that this is the first time Vinnie has called her since they left.

“I literally just need you to check they’re not dead,” Emily pleads, barely finishing her sentence before her sister begins a frustrated, guttural moan. She raises her voice over it. “Why can’t you do it?”

“Because,” Vinnie whines, “I don’t understand your instructions.”

“They are so clear, Vin. You can’t even complain about my handwriting, Sue wrote them out for you.”

“I just don’t get them. There’s so many steps. Also, I’m not even home yet so there’s no guarantee I’ll even get up in time. You probably can’t tell, but I am a little buzzed right now.”

“Shocking,” Emily says, silently rolling her eyes. For someone so into meditation, her sister is often extremely unaware of herself, a classic Dickinson trait, all three of them bearing this chaotic streak in their genes. Emily’s has mellowed a little now, since Sue. Since she’s felt more settled. Existing where she was always meant to be has made her less restless. Vinnie retains her chaos, and when she’s drunk, it distils into this, an almost teenage disdain for everyone around her, an oddly endearing selfishness coming through.

“I only need you to do it like twice. Our neighbour’s doing it every other day.”

Truthfully, Vinnie was not her first choice of emergency bee-sitter, and she regrets asking her now. But her options were limited. Austin would forget, her parents would simply refuse. Lavinia was the only one she trusted enough to even make the effort to go to her house. She’s not so sure about that now, though.

“Please, Vin?” she tries, putting on her best please don’t make me deal with this on my honeymoon voice.

Vinnie grunts, and then goes quiet for a few seconds. Emily wonders, briefly, if she’s fallen asleep, and is about to quietly hang up the phone and forget about it. Then she returns, resigned to helping her.

“Fine,” she says, before making an alarming sound that Emily guesses is the combination of a yawn and another hiccup. “But you better bring me a great gift.”

“Already on it. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Vinnie says sleepily.

“Now, much as I love you, please leave me alone,” Emily replies fondly.

“Okay, okay. Enjoy your sex-cation.”

“I will,” Emily says, not bothering to correct her. “Go away now.”

“Bye, weirdo,” Vinnie says, and then she’s gone.

Emily smiles and puts her phone down, only now noticing Sue leaning against the doorframe, in her bathrobe, holding two cups. Her wife. Still, the thought feels strange. Somehow it’s odd and new but also entirely familiar. Like they’ve always been this. It’s just official now. Legally binding. She drops her eyes to the wedding ring on Sue’s left hand and her heart flutters in her ribcage. She’s not cold anymore. Sue has this effect on her.

“Hi,” she says, teeth tugging at her bottom lip.

“Hi baby.”

Sue comes closer now, placing the mugs down on the nightstand, and sitting on the edge of the bed.

“What did Vinnie want?” she says, reaching forward to tuck a stray hair behind Emily’s ear.

“What does she ever want?”

Emily shrugs, smiles, and presses a kiss to her palm. Her skin tastes sweet, the remnants of honey lingering on her from the spoonful stirred into their coffee. She resists the urge to swipe it with her tongue, and instead sighs into her hand.

“How’d we get so lucky?”

“I don’t know,” Sue says, inching closer, her hand remaining firmly on Emily’s cheek, by her lips. “I don’t think it matters.”

She leans in then, gently pulling Emily’s head towards her, and kisses her, open mouthed, tentatively prying her open, a thumb brushing her neck. Emily lets her in, savouring the warmth of her breath on her skin until Sue pulls back, keeping their foreheads pressed together, her hand massaging Emily’s scalp.

“What do you want to do today?” she says, her brown eyes looking up through her lashes.

“Hm,” Emily hums contentedly. “Can we go see that lavender field?”

“Yeah,” Sue smiles. It had been what Emily was most excited for. The purple blooms in the early summer, rows of fragrant flowers for her to walk through all afternoon.

“How about,” she says, “we go get breakfast at that bakery around the corner, then we go see the lavender. And then I think I just wanna drink wine and eat cheese with you all day.”

Emily laughs quietly, her eyes flicking down to Sue’s chest as her own fills with warmth, raising her colour. She fiddles with the belt of Sue’s robe, running it through her fingers, absent-mindedly loosening the knot.

“Sounds perfect.”

“Good.”

The belt loosens in her hands, the robe falling open slightly, exposing Sue’s bare skin, the defined line that runs from below her ribs to just above her navel. Lavender seems less exciting now.

“Alternatively,” she says, and she can almost hear Sue smirk as she does, and feels her lips brush across her forehead. “We could just stay in bed all day.”

“Also an option.”

Emily lets her fingers glide up her breastbone, to her shoulder, where she pushes the robe away, letting it fall down her back. She’s sure that, one day, the sight of Sue won’t knock all the breath out of her, that she’ll be able to look at this body that she has known and loved for so long and be able to contain herself. But that feels a long way off just now.

“Tempting,” she says, biting her lip.

“We can always go out later,” Sue says, her voice low, wearing a smile that makes Emily forget her own name, relinquish control and do whatever she was told to do.

“Okay,” she whispers, a drop in her stomach, something pulsing at the apex of her thighs.

Then Sue is pressed up against her, wrapped in her legs, the robe completely discarded and her mouth on Emily’s neck. She arches to it, her body stretching, reaching for more. Red bruises bloom under her skin, beneath Sue’s lips, and she hisses when she’s caught gently between Sue’s teeth. She lets out a long breath, and their fingers lace together.

“God, I love you,” she murmurs, as Sue peppers kisses across her chest, her collar bone, the dip of her sternum.

“I love you too,” Sue says, looking up at her with her chin resting on Emily’s abdomen.

“Now say it in French,” Emily giggles, and Sue rolls her eyes, pulling herself back up so her lips move against Emily’s ear, the heat of her voice melting through her.

“Je t’aime, mon bourdon."

Blood rushes through Emily’s body, her face reddening and her pulse spiking in her ears. Her body prickles with heat, and she fails to suppress the low, earthy moan that escapes her throat. Primal and unchecked.

“Fuck, Duolingo made you so much hotter,” she breathes, lying back and closing her eyes.

Her breath hitches as Sue travels down her body, pressing kisses to her belly, her hip bones and the insides of her thighs. She jolts when she’s touched, briefly, fleetingly, fingers brushing through her, lips pressed just shy of where she wants them, suspended over the edge of a deep fall. And then melting into something softer and altogether less solid when Sue is finally buried between her legs, gasping and falling into her. She loses track of how many waves Sue pushes her through, how many times she stops breathing, or feels herself shatter apart while time slows down.

She focuses on her wife whispering to her in broken French, supporting her back, cradling her carefully, and kissing her softly while she comes.

Je t’aime

Mon bourdon

Ma poète

Notes:

Je t'aime, mon bourdon, ma poete = i love you, my bumblebee, my poet

(i do not speak french, just blindly trusting google translate here)

they're having the gayest honeymoon ever, and i love that for them!!!

thanks so much for reading my stupid fluff and leaving silly little nice comments, it's not at all helping me get over them but i'm okay with that :)

Chapter 5

Notes:

Well would you look at that, I did forget about it. But then I remembered!!! So here we are, another stupid fluffy bee thing!!!

tw: miscarriage

you know, a heart can be broken, but it keeps on beating, just the same

29

She thought it would feel better than this. Now, stretched out in front of her, she’s faced with months of time. Time to rest and prepare, and recover, and learn. Learn how to be responsible for a whole new human being. Learn how to feed them and bathe them and make sure they don’t die, because they’re so tiny when they’re that new. Vulnerable, altogether too soft to be out in the world.

She should feel relieved, she supposes, that she gets to do all of that without worrying whether a class of sweaty and pubescent youths understand Pythagoras’s Theorum. But instead there’s this tugging feeling, in the back of her brain and the pit of her stomach. Reminding her to keep fretting.

Sue closes the front door by leaning against it, carrying gift bags on her elbows and balancing a basket of blankets between her arm and her bump. She can hear the faint sound of humming and she forgets how tired she is, for just a second.

Upstairs, when she finally makes it, Emily is reaching up to the top of the wall with a paint roller, wearing an oversized shirt and her old man boxer shorts, barefoot and splattered with pale green paint. She’s humming to herself, almost tunelessly, which makes Sue smile because she knows Emily can hold a tune, better than most. But when she’s focussing on something, everything else goes out the window. She moves forward, putting her full (two person) weight on the creaky floorboard. Emily turns quickly, like she’s been pulled out of a trance. She takes in the basket in Sue’s arms and immediately her eyes widen with concern.

“Hey!” she says, practically throwing the paint roller to the ground and lurching towards her. “Give me that.”

“Em, I’m fine,” Sue protests, but Emily doesn’t hear, and has already taken it from her, setting it down in the corner of the room.

“Sit down,” she says, guiding her to the rocking chair they bought last weekend from an antique store, covered with a white sheet.

“Emily -”

“Sit down please, heavily pregnant wife.”

Sue sits, leaning back into the cushions Emily had bought along with it. She’s been like this for a while, going out of her way to do things for Sue. Plumping her pillows, tying her shoelaces, and on one particularly difficult morning, feeding her porridge a spoonful at a time. Sue supposes it’s her own way of worrying. Better than what she does - sitting silently with a feeling of dread gnawing at her insides.

“Hi,” Emily whispers, catching Sue’s lips in a soft kiss and kneeling in front of her. “Good last day?” she says, resting her hands gently on the rise of Sue’s stomach.

“Yeah. Got some nice stuff. Blankets and clothes. A breast pump that I don’t want to use,” she grimaces.

That had been a discussion. Which one of them would do this, go through the effort of physically forming a person and then splitting themselves in two just to meet them. Give themselves to something without question. They had come to the conclusion that it should be Sue. And she had wanted it, she had felt a harsh pang of grief when she thought of family. Emily had said she needed something that shared her blood and her DNA. Another Gilbert. The world had enough Dickinsons, she’d said, smiling and kissing her cheek.

“Good,” Emily says, and runs her hand up Sue’s arm, steady and soothing. “Hey, I’m almost done. I just need to clean some bits up, and then Vinnie can come and finish the mural.”

She looks proudly at the neatly painted walls. All the furniture they bought is either covered up or still in boxes, in all their various parts. Sue silently thanks some higher power that Austin agreed to put it all together for them.

“Do you like it?” Emily says, filling her quiet spaces, as she always does. Sue nods, staring blankly at the wall where Vinnie has sketched out their backyard. Beehives in front of a rainbow. It’s cute, and Sue wishes she could enjoy it fully.

“Yeah. It’s pretty,” she sighs, managing a tiny smile. Emily stays quiet, her eyes lingering on her and Sue can’t muster the energy to explain herself.

“Honey,” she says, settling at her feet and leaning on Sue’s knees. “What is it?”

“Hm?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh. Nothing.”

Emily tilts her head to one side, and forces Sue to look her in the eyes. That gnawing feeling is back, steady swells of nausea, like the ground is shifting beneath her and she can’t find her footing. She presses her lips together, biting down hard.

“You know that I know exactly what you look like when you’re lying, right?”

Emily laces their fingers together and Sue grips her tightly. She hasn’t let herself think about it all day. And that only made it worse, the seasick feeling in her stomach. Emily has noticed, though she hasn’t said anything. Not asking what’s wrong until she knows Sue will cave in and let it go.

“C’mon. Tell me.”

“I - ” Sue stutters, immediately feeling her throat catch and her eyes start to sting. She sets her jaw, teeth slamming together, and tries to remember to keep breathing. Emily always makes sure of that. Because this was a habit of hers, before she started therapy. Emily used to curl up behind her on bad days so Sue could feel her chest filling and emptying, slow and deliberate. Emily waits patiently, her thumb moving in small repetitive circles on the back of Sue’s hand.

“I can’t. I can’t stop thinking about the first one,” she manages, heaving it out. A dead weight in her body.

Emily deflates, and Sue collapses in on herself, tears falling from her eyes in shaky sobs.

“Oh, Sue,” Emily says quietly, kneeling up to her, pulling Sue’s head towards her to place gentle kisses along her hairline.

“I really don’t want to,” Sue cries gently, “I really want to be excited, but everytime I think about him coming I think about the hospital and then everything else.”

Everything else. The blood, and the white walls, and the red mark she’d left on Emily’s hand as she held it during the ultrasound.

“It’s okay,” Emily says, brushing her hair back and leaning their heads together.

“It’s stupid. It wasn’t even a baby, not really.”

“It was a baby to us,” Emily whispers. “It was a baby to you and me. Something we made.”

Emily knew, Sue thought. The last few weeks, she’s known. She must feel the palpable change in mood when they go to the maternity ward, see the way she stares at the screen in their scans. Sue hears her take control in these moments, ask the questions, and make sure everything’s okay. And she loves her for that. She loves her for the ice cream she makes sure is in the freezer after their appointments, and the quiet way she takes care of her.

Can someone please tell me where my wife is, Sue had heard her almost yell before she burst into the hospital room and held her while she cried.

“I promise you, it’s not stupid,” she says, her thumb collecting the tears on Sue’s cheek. “You’re allowed to think about it, it’s okay.”

“You don’t,” Sue sniffs, but Emily is already shaking her head.

“I do. All the time. About how scared I was, and how brave you are. And about the baby. We don’t have to forget about it. I don’t want to.”

“Me neither,” Sue says, her voice small, pressing her fingers into Emily’s hands.

“Okay,” Emily whispers. “Okay.”

Sue relaxes a little, listening to Emily's breathing and trying to match it to her own, measuring the pulses of her heart against the throbbing in her wife’s wrist.

“I just don’t wanna do anything wrong,” she says, her voice still thick with tears.

“What could you possibly be doing wrong,” Emily asks, brushing stray hairs from her face and tucking them carefully behind her ears.

“I don’t know. Anything.”

“You could never,” Emily smiles.

Sue sniffs, and lets the tension in her jaw go, a little at a time. She’ll remember, she thinks, that Emily is always here. No one is going anywhere this time, everyone is safe and everyone is healthy and this baby will be okay.

Emily waits for her breathing to even out, watching for the signs that Sue is calming down. When she settles, Emily squeezes her hand and presses it to her mouth.

“Tell you what,” she says, turning back to the mural. “We’ll ask Vinnie to add something, a flower, or something.”

“What kind of flower?” Sue says, knowing Emily will pick the right one.

“Bluebells,” she says after a breath. “And forgetmenots. In that corner.”

She points to the space by the rainbow, drawing a circle with her finger. Sue nods.

“Okay,” she says.

Emily lays her head down in Sue’s lap and wraps an arm around her shins. Sue reaches for her spare hand and places it against her stomach, their fingers interlocking and feeling the tiny kicks coming from inside her.

“Hear that?” Emily murmurs, turning her head towards Sue’s bump. “He says I’m okay Mom. It’s going to be okay.”

Chapter 6

Notes:

hello i am back with, once again, absolutely no plot. only fluff.

that being said i do miss writing their angsty little friends to lovers stories, but there's only so much of that we can all take!!!!!

i'm glad people seem to be enjoying this <3

all the bedrooms had rose-patterned wallpaper that looked so pretty when the lamps were turned on at night

 

31

Sue’s favourite thing about home is the way the weight lifts from her shoulders when she walks through the door.

Something about the house helps her breathe a little deeper. Muddy boots on the rack, the tickets from the poetry lecture they went to for Emily’s birthday last year still tacked to the notice board, a photo of them on the dresser - eighteen, beer soaked and happy, the night before they left for college. Not pictured, she knows, are Emily’s arms, wrapped tightly around her waist, the way they always are now. She had spent much of their freshman year trying to work out how to get Emily to touch her as much as possible. Squeezing into a single bed, sitting on crowded subway trains, wearing impractical shoes so Emily would have to hold her hand to help her balance. Not that she ever had to try too hard. Emily would always gravitate back to her.

Sue hears her shout Momma’s home from the back porch, followed by a high pitched squeal, and she drops her bag to the floor to follow the sound.

She finds them with the screen door open, the smell of a casserole coming from the oven, and Ned in nothing but a diaper and his baby overalls - his gardening suit, Emily calls it - covered in dirt and surrounded by plant pots and compost.

“What have you been doing?” she says happily, bending down to lift Ned up, his arms stretched up to her urgently. She kisses his cheek, unbothered by the soil on his face and hugs him to her hip.

“We’re planting tomatoes,” Emily says, and stands from her spot in the chaos to greet her. She misses it, being home with them. Showing Ned the budding apple trees and watching him learn the things that make them happy.

“Momma!” Ned shouts, one of the only words he says right now, along with dees and flowders. Emily’s influence.

“Mmm, tomatoes are Momma’s favourite,” Sue says to him, brushing his dark hair behind his ears. It’s getting long, but she can’t bring herself to cut his curls off just yet. It feels like a milestone she’s not ready for. Emily smiles and places her hand on the small of Sue’s back, warmth radiating from it, leaving a muddy mark on her shirt.

“Hi honey,” Sue says, and leans up to kiss her gently on the lips while Ned wriggles contentedly in her arms.

“Hi,” Emily says, “good day?”

“Better now,” Sue sighs, closing her eyes and leaning against her for a moment. She has very few bad days now, and proudly tells her therapist this at their monthly sessions. Bad days are the ones that don’t have this at the end of them; Emily and Ned, normally both covered in something they shouldn’t be, but smiling.

“Dinner’s almost done,” Emily says, handing Sue a cloth for Ned’s hands, and heading to the fridge. Sue wipes his hands and face, deciding to leave his bath until after he inevitably spills his food all over himself. He’s beginning to look more like her now, growing into his Gilbert features. Sometimes she sees her dad across his eyes and her chest swells with something unnameable, something big and beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time.

She carries him around the kitchen as she sets the table, showing him each thing as she finds them. Plate, cup, fork. He repeats some back and stares blankly at others, too sleepy to practise all of his words right now. She sits him in his high chair as Emily serves up two plates of casserole for them and a little bowl of mashed up vegetables for Ned.

“Say thank you Mommy”, Sue says, making sure her mouth shapes all the words properly so he can learn. He gurgles something back that sounds enough like thank you, and Sue starts mashing up his food.

“How’d the algebra test go?” Emily says, sitting down.

“Oh, really good - not yet sweetie, it’s hot,” she moves Ned’s bowl a little further away, and he makes a puffing motion with his cheeks, blowing on the steam. “Remember that kid I told you about - Buddy? He got an A.”

“See, that’s because of you. He could barely do multiplication last semester.”

“He actually has a head for math, I think he’s just never had a good teacher,” she says, idly stirring Ned’s bowl of mush. “How was your day?”

“We did lots of gardening, didn’t we bub?”

He kicks his chubby legs back and forth in his high chair, indicating that, yes, they did do a lot of gardening today. Sue begins to feed him a mouthful at a time, and he tries to help, reaching to grab food off the spoon, and smearing it all over himself.

“That sounds nice” Sue says, almost to herself. “I miss getting to do that with you guys.”

“Hang in there baby,” Emily says, smiling at her. “Almost summer vacation.”

~

It always astounds her, how quickly he grows. He sits up in the bath now, moves around by himself and resists when she tries to wash his hair. He hates having his hair washed. He whimpers as she rinses his head and grunts crossly when she combs his curls out. But still, when she lifts him out and wraps him in a warm towel, he clings to her, like a reflex, curling himself around her torso and becoming part of her again.

He knows which books he likes, demands them when she’s successfully wriggled him into his pyjamas, using the only words he knows to describe the stories. She’s read the same one to him every night this week, his newest hyperfixation. Sometimes Emily reads him poetry, her own or her favourites, the rhythm of it lulling him to sleep. Tonight he nods off on Sue’s chest, his tiny hand clutching her sleeve, his cheek pressed into her. She puts him down in his crib and tiptoes out, into their bedroom down the hall.

“Em?” She says, walking into an empty room. There’s a clatter from their bathroom, a muffled crash, followed by Emily muttering shit to herself. Sue smiles and opens the door.

“Are you okay?”

Emily is clearing up the broken glass of a smashed scented candle while the bathtub fills.

“Yeah,” she sighs, “almost set the house on fire but other than that it’s fine.”

She tips it into the trash can, and turns the water off, swirling her hand around the tub to spread the bubbles out. Already there are two wine glasses set on the counter. Sue smirks. Emily doesn’t drink wine usually, only for her. She gets to her before she’s even managed to stand up straight, wrapping her arms around her torso and kissing her hard. Emily sways slightly with the force of it, hands instinctively gripping at Sue’s hips.

“Hi,” she mumbles, as Sue slips her fingers underneath her shirt and pulls it upwards, baring Emily’s stomach, then her chest, her shoulders. She tosses it to the ground and buries her face in her neck, placing soft kisses in the dip of her neck, the edge of her collarbone.

“Your bath’s gonna go cold.”

“Hm,” Sue hums, before unbuttoning Emily’s pants. “I thought you were joining me.”

“Oh,” and Sue smirks to herself when Emily takes a sharp inhale, her fingers running over her underwear. “Yeah. Okay.”

She undresses her a little slower, pressing her lips to her whenever she unearths a little more. Emily is wonderfully familiar to her now. The small birthmark on her left shoulder blade, the bruise on her hip from when she walked into the doorframe last week, the raised skin of the tattoo on her bicep. The muscles in her arms flex slightly, tensing against Sue when she’s wound up, and a slight pink hue spreads across her chest under the heat of the water.

Sue will never get tired of this.

She tightens her hold around Emily’s torso, her hand drawing one last circle, pulling one last shudder from her, before trailing back to her stomach and tracing lazy figure-of-eights across her skin. Emily settles back into her, and mumbles something incoherent, turning her head to one side and letting her lips brush against Sue’s chest as she speaks. She smiles, more than a little smugly, mentally congratulating herself for still being able to render her wife utterly useless.

“What was that baby?” she says, smirking.

“Shush,” Emily murmurs affectionately.

“Okay. Hey.”

Emily grunts in response, her eyes still closed.

“Do you want another kid?”

She says it so calmly, as if it isn’t a big question or a discussion, but braces herself for a debate, remembering how terrified Emily was of parenthood to begin with; how she wouldn’t hold Ned for more than a few minutes at a time when he was a newborn, for fear that she’d drop him or ruin him somehow. Sue had never seen her so scared of anything before.

“Yeah, okay,” Emily sighs, tangling their fingers together under the water.

Sue laughs and leans down to look at her. She’s still on the edge of sleep and it’s entirely possible they’ll have to revisit this later.

“Really?” she whispers, and Emily lifts her head now, and brings Sue’s hand to her lips.

“Yeah. I mean, we’re obviously very good at it,” Emily smirks. “I’d say our first attempt turned out pretty well. Why wouldn’t I want another one?”

“I don’t know. I just thought you’d take more convincing.”

Emily sighs dramatically and runs a hand down Sue’s thigh. She hopes she never stops feeling that tingling sensation when Emily touches her, a fizzing feeling under her skin.

“Well, you did ask me while I was in a very vulnerable state. Very sneaky of you to pop that question after having your way with me.”

Sue giggles into her hairline, kissing along her forehead softly. She feels Emily’s eyes close again, her eyelashes brushing against her chest, and holds her a little tighter.

“Mm. I should remember to do that more often.”

Chapter 7

Notes:

periodic dickinson obsession in full force, and this time there’s fluff AND smut, you have been warned :)

people just fell in love with her on first sight. you just couldn’t help yourself

33

“Remind me why we decided to drive this thing,” Sue says, watching Emily waft away smoke from the open hood of her rickety truck.

“Because I was driving,” Emily coughs.

“And we couldn’t have taken my car?”

“I don’t like driving your car, it’s too quiet, and it doesn’t make the right noises,” she says.

“That’s because it was made this century.”

Emily grunts in frustration and kicks the tyre. She hurts her toe in the process, and she knows that Sue sees; she rolls her eyes as Emily winces and tries to cover it up.

“I’m gonna call a mechanic,” Sue sighs, searching for the number they might as well have on speed dial by now. She holds the phone to her ear and watches as Emily fiddles with different bits of the engine. She’s too annoyed right now, but if she weren’t so stressed she’d be smiling fondly at the scene with the knowledge that Emily has absolutely no idea what she’s doing with it. Buying a farm seems to have filled her with a kind of can-do attitude, as if she can prove her parents wrong with sheer will-power and determination. She pulls something out of the hood, something large and metallic that seems like it shouldn’t be removed.

By the time Sue finishes with the mechanic, Emily is covered in black oil, and the truck is still dead. She’s leaning against the door, a sullen look on her face.

“It’s gonna be a couple of hours,” Sue says, a little more gently now.

“Sorry,” Emily says, reaching out her hand to Sue’s waist.

“It’s okay,” Sue smiles. “I think it might be time.”

“For what?”

“To let the truck go.”

Emily pouts and widens her eyes at her. She’d bought it just after spending her savings on the house, both already falling to bits to begin with. Sue admits that the house was a great investment, having helped her fix it up slowly over the years and build a life in it. She’s deeply fond of their white farmhouse and all its various idiosyncrasies. The truck, however, she would have been very glad to have sold for parts years ago. Emily had insisted on keeping it, even when Ned was born, arguing that it had back seats for him in its extra large cab, and besides, she still needed it for work.

“I’m not ready yet,” Emily protests.

“I think the truck is,” Sue retorts.

“I’ve not even had her ten years!”

“Honey, it’s like a forty year old husk. I think it’s lived a long enough life.”

“Yeah. Well we’ll wait and see what the mechanic says,” Emily grumbles, and Sue nods, stifling a laugh.

“Okay. Sure.”

She looks over to the kids, Mattie fast asleep in her car seat next to Emily, removed from the truck in haste when they didn’t know what the smoke meant. Ned totters around the grassy bank Sue put him on behind them, initially worried he’d wander into the road but, lucky for them, his obsession with flowers keeps him firmly away, picking his favourites and gripping them in his little fist.

Sue reaches through the window to grab the baby sling and picks up the car seat, moving Mattie over to her brother. Sitting on the ground, she straps the carrier to herself and gently lifts Mattie towards her. She stirs a little, squeaking and fidgeting in her sleep. It’s not until she’s strapped in that Sue feels her wake up, craning her neck to look up at the sky and blink at it in an unimpressed manner. Sue shushes her quietly and begins to bounce up and down to rock her back into her nap.

“Hey, Em,” Sue calls, watching her wife kick dust around the road sullenly. “Someone needs to call your mom.”

“Oh god,” Emily groans, turning to the truck and bumping her forehead against it. “She’s gonna kill me.”

“Well I’m not doing it, she already hates me,” Sue says, keeping an eye on Ned as his flower hunt takes him a little further away.

“My mother doesn’t hate you, it’s just that criticism is the only way she knows how to show love,” Emily says, and takes her phone from her back pocket.

“Tell that to Austin,” Sue mumbles under her breath, pressing Mattie’s chubby hand to her lips.

Emily dials and Sue watches nervously, always a little on edge wherever Mrs Dickinson is concerned.

“Hey Mom,” she starts, already anticipating a shouting match. “Little problem, we broke down and we’re stuck until the recovery guys can get here.”

She pauses, and Sue can hear the voice on the other end of the line growing higher in pitch and volume by the second.

“We’re still a few hours away - ”

Mrs Dickinson cuts her off, and Emily is growing quieter and quieter, turning away from Sue a little.

“No, they can’t get here for a while. I don’t think we’ll make the start - ”

Another muffled line from the phone. Emily turns back to her now, coming to sit down beside her on the grass, and puts her mother on speakerphone.

“ - really Emily, on the most important day of your brother’s life - ”

“I mean,” Emily cuts in, risking disaster, “technically tomorrow is the most important day of his life. Tonight’s just the rehearsal dinner.”

Sue grimaces as Mrs Dickinson predictably loses her patience and, subsequently, her shit.

“I don’t care Emily, you’re supposed to be making a speech,” her mother practically screams down the phone. “Why you insist on driving that pile of junk is beyond me. If you had a real job maybe you could afford a better car.”

“Yeah. Okay, I’ve already had this particular lecture from Sue,” she sighs, and Sue lays a supportive hand on her leg before carefully pushing herself to an upright position to steer Ned away from the road.

“We’ll get there when we get there,” Emily sighs, resigned to it now. “Tell Austin we’re sorry.”

She hangs up before her mother can say anything else, and flops backwards to lie down. Sue returns, herding their son back to safety, and he toddles up to Emily and lies directly on top of her.

“Hi Mommy,” he grins, face sticky from the car snack he wolfed down a half hour ago.

“Hi nugget,” Emily says, brightening a little and wrapping her arms around him.

“I picked you some fowers,” he says, and drops a handful of crushed petals on her chest, Emily smiling as she picks through them. She sits up and gets him to spread out his collection in front of them, one squashed and barely recognisable bloom at a time. Sue watches fondly as Emily teaches him the name and the meaning for each and marvels at the way she is so gentle. Each day, Sue knows, she makes a deliberate choice to be as un-Dickinsonian as possible in her parenting. There is no trace of her mother, impossible to please and only ever disappointed; nothing of her father who, though Emily would never admit it, always kept his love for his children conditional, dependent on their worth in his world. Sue kisses Emily’s shoulder gently, Mattie and Ned sandwiched between them, and the stress from the smoking truck dissipates.

~

Six hours, a tow truck, and one rental car later, Sue ushers the kids into the ballroom of a lavishly decorated Newport hotel, stuffed so full to the brim with flowers that she can immediately feel her eyes start to water from the scent. She ought to have expected this level of extravagance, really - Emily Norcross-Dickinson has spoken of nothing but her son’s society wedding for the two long years he and Jane have been engaged - but still it jolts her a little, when she remembers the social class against which her wife rebels.

She had felt it keenly as a child, appearing at every family dinner like a stowaway Emily had kept hidden in her room until it was simply too late to send her home.

She ate duck a l’orange with silverware that cost more than she knew, trying to shrink herself enough so that her presence might go unnoticed. And she was grateful for the way her now in-laws dutifully pretended that having an orphan (with a perfectly good foster home to go back to) at the dinner table every night was nothing out of the ordinary.

They’ve barely stepped inside before Mrs Dickinson crosses the room towards them, an insincere smile plastered on her face, and pulls her daughter into a stilted embrace. She grips Emily’s elbow with enough force to leave white imprints in her skin.

“Hello dears,” she announces, more to the room than to them. Then, quieter, when her cheek is beside Emily’s in a faux-kiss, she hisses “your speech is in eight minutes, don’t you dare leave this room.”

She greets the children before Sue, straightening Ned’s bow tie that she bought him especially, and hoisting Mattie out of Sue’s arms without permission.

“Susan,” she says, nodding at her tightly. Then, as if cued by Emily’s glare from the corner of her eye, leans in to kiss her cheek.

“Hi Mrs Dickinson,” she relents. Today is not the day to pick a fight with her mother-in-law. “Everything looks beautiful.”

“It does. Such a shame you’ve had less time to enjoy it than the rest of us.”

She’s already walking away, granddaughter on her hip and grandson toddling by her side. Emily exhales, and lowers her forehead onto Sue’s shoulder, both of them already willing the night to end.

“You’re so lucky you don’t have parents,” she whines.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Sue says, an impish grin working its way across her face. “I’m so glad my whole family died in a horrible accident.”

She dusts a kiss across Emily’s temple, careful not to give Mrs Dickinson any more ammunition by leaving lipstick stains behind. Emily giggles softly into Sue’s dress, this joke between them settling comfortably in a way it couldn’t with anyone else. She’s the only one who has ever treated Sue like a normal person. She never asked about what had happened, mostly because she knew already. Amherst was small and people had always talked, Mrs Dickinson being one of the more dedicated gossip-spreaders in town. Sue told her, in her own time, about being collected from school one day by a social worker; about how, as she sat waiting in the hospital, she started to pick at her cuticles until they bled, a habit she only managed to quit in recent years.

As Emily became less a friend and more an extension of Sue’s own body and consciousness, she started allowing her coping mechanisms to reveal themselves, humour included.

“Best thing that ever happened to me,” she says flatly.

“Besides me.”

Emily looks up at her, takes her chin between her fingers and kisses her quickly. Sue lets her hands settle on her waist, and just before the urge to pull her closer, kiss her harder overwhelms her completely, she spots Austin and Lavinia coming towards them over Emily’s shoulder.

“I’m so sorry we’re late,” she starts, pulling them into a mass hug. Emily’s arm reaches up behind her brother and ruffles his hair, which he immediately smooths back down, sticking his tongue out at her in the process.

“Relax,” Austin smiles lopsidedly, “she’s been unbearable for the last month anyway, you guys being late hardly made any difference.”

Vinnie snorts, and rolls her eyes, quick to break her brother’s breezy facade.

“Oh please, I heard her shriek after you got off the phone with her.”

“She’ll get over it,” Austin waves her off.

“Anyway, now you’re here you can help me avoid a certain someone,” Vinnie says, glaring at Austin with eyes like daggers.

“Vin, I already told you I can’t uninvite him from the wedding the day before -”

“Ugh, who’s side are you on?”

“Wait, circle back,” Sue says, steering the conversation back to the realm of her understanding. “Who are we talking about?”

“Ship-”

“Don’t mention his name around me Austin, it’s messing with my aura!”

“Wait, you guys broke up?” Emily says.

“Yeah - ”

“Like less than twelve hours ago,” Austin cuts in, agitated by his sister’s dramatics.

“Oh my god, are you okay?” Emily asks, grabbing Lavinia’s hand. None of them, Lavinia included, were ever that keen on Henry Shipley, but Sue reminds herself that the penchant for exaggeration runs in the family.

“Well I would be if someone wasn’t making me walk down the aisle with him tomorrow,” she spits, and shoots another piercing stare at Austin.

“I told you to get Mom to switch you with someone, that’s not my area.”

“What exactly is your area?”

“Okay - let’s - Austin, where’s Jane?” Emily changes the subject.

Austin spins round, suddenly aware that his fiance isn’t nearby, and Sue hears Emily stifle a laugh behind her, forever amused by his unobservant nature. Ironically it’s a trait he and Emily share.

“Oh god,” he groans as his eyes settle on Jane, nodding anxiously while his mother and aunt parade her around the room, Ned and Mattie in tow, introducing her to everyone they can. “Mom’s barely let her out of her sight all day. I gotta go rescue her.”

“I’ll come with,” Emily groans, checking her watch. “My speech is in three minutes, apparently.”

“Go get ‘em sweetie,” Sue smiles, and kisses her before Emily turns around to see her mother gesticulating angrily at her. It’s amazing, really. The way she’s managed to make each of her children so distinctly unlike her.

Sue watches Emily hurry away, and for the first time today, with no toddlers to keep an eye on and no baby to feed, realises that she’s wearing the red dress that grazes over her body in a way that makes Sue’s heart stutter. When she’d told her she looked good in it, it became her go-to choice for every special event. She takes a glass of champagne from a passing tray, and sips to disguise the reddening of her cheeks as she remembers it the way it was the first evening it was worn; discarded on their bedroom floor while Emily came apart above her, a bead of sweat trailing down the expanse of her neck and over the ridge of her collarbone.

“Ugh,” comes Lavinia’s familiar scoff from beside her, cooling her off considerably. “You two are so cute it’s almost disgusting.”

“Hm,” Sue chuckles, and watches as the siblings bicker with their relatives at the other end of the room. “Thanks.”

Over at the bar, Henry Shipley nurses a large glass of amber coloured liquid, and shoots forlorn glances over in their direction.

“I’m sorry about you and Ship,” Sue offers, but really she’s anything but. Mostly, she’s glad she doesn’t have to suffer through another family dinner biting her tongue while he discusses states’ rights with her father-in-law and calls the newest young Republican candidate for Senate pretty radical, man.

“It’s fine. It wasn’t meant to be,” Lavinia says sagely.

“What happened?”

“Nothing, really. He’s just not mature enough. No one ever is.”

“Sure,” Sue nods sympathetically.

“Also he said some pretty boomer stuff about slavery reparations, so,”

“Yikes,” Sue winces.

“Yeah. God, I’m just so done with men,” she asserts, a hint of a petulant whine in her voice. Sue wraps an arm around her waist fondly, and gives her a squeeze.

“You and me both, Vin.”

“And honestly, I see you and Emily, and I think man, if I had something even remotely close to that I would never let it go.”

Sue detects the undercurrent of genuine heartbreak, somewhere in her sister-in-law’s sardonic exterior. An accidental wobble in her usually deliberate way of speaking. She’s always had a soft spot for the often overlooked middle Dickinson.

Pretty, endearing, and endlessly unpredictable, Lavinia has always walked the world with a trail of hapless boys in her wake, hanging on her every word. Sometimes, presumably like this time, she dumped them, bored of their attention and irritated by their presence. Other times their stupidity won out, and they’d pass her over for far less interesting girls, leaving a secretly brokenhearted Vinnie alone, sageing the negative energy from her apartment and burning incense to hide her disappointment.

“You’ll find it,” she says, and rests a chin on Vinnie’s shoulder. “I’m sure I could help.”

“Thanks Sue, but I just can’t switch sides. Believe me, I’ve tried my hardest but I’m heterosexual through and through,” Vinnie says sadly, but Sue sees a smirk pulling up the corners of her mouth nonetheless.

“And lesbians everywhere lament,” Sue laughs, and plants a kiss on Vinnie’s cheek. “Seriously. There’s someone out there who values you for you. And until you find them, you’re more than enough all on your own.”

“Hm, thanks,” Vinnie smiles. “I’d just like the all on my own part to be over soon.”

Before Sue can comfort her any further, Mr Dickinson makes his way up to the microphone by the swing band and clinks his fork against a crystal champagne glass.

“Ahem,” he starts, and Sue and Lavinia sigh in unison, readying themselves for the predictably lack-lustre jumble of words he has prepared.

“Evening everyone. Father of the groom here.” He shuffles his feet, and sticks his free hand in his pocket. A peculiar look washes over him as he takes in the room. Admittedly, there are an obscene number of guests here, and he seems to pale at the realisation. Sue will never understand how this guy ever ran for congress, let alone won.

“On behalf of my family…just to say…thank you for coming…”

Another shuffle of his feet, another cough, and a loud ringing sound as he faces the wrong way and unleashes a screech of microphone feedback loud enough to deafen half the room.

“Wonderful evening…and I’m sure..tomorrow will be…um…wonderful, too.

“Jesus, Dad,” Vinnie mutters under her breath, as they both watch his wife at the side of the stage, growing more irritable and red in the face by the second.

“We wish Austin and Jane…every er…good fortune,” he mumbles, and as he turns to the head table, he must catch sight of Mrs Dickinson and the metaphorical fumes of steam spouting angrily from her ears, because he seems to glance back to the audience and make the wise decision to cut his speech short. “But of course, now, I’ll hand over to someone who’s much better with words. My dearest daughter Emily.”

Sue grimaces at the inadvertent ranking of his children, and gives Lavinia another loving squeeze on the arm, while Emily stumbles up to the stage. Obviously not expecting to be called on so soon, she takes the microphone from her father to scattered applause. She takes in the sea of faces, mostly unfamiliar, and it takes a moment before Sue manages to catch her gaze.

When Austin had asked her to make a speech, she had almost said no. She offered to write one instead, and swore she’d find someone else to deliver it, but Austin was adamant that she would be his best man, and take on every duty the role traditionally entailed. Emily has never been great at being the centre of attention, but Sue had quietly convinced her that this, like all things, was something she was capable of.

Emily finds her eyes in the expanse of the hotel ballroom and exhales.

“Thanks, Dad,” she begins, and clears her throat. Flashcards in hand, she winks at Sue and smiles, before she’s able to look at the rest of the room.

Sue marvels at her ability to hold a crowd, a reverence settling over them all as her words cradle them in midair. She’s only telling anecdotes about Austin, but she has this knack for finding the guts and innards of seemingly ordinary words, and laying them bare. Every word uttered by Emily always feels like she’s found a new, truer meaning for it. For someone who shies away from the limelight, it seems the whole party is struggling to take their eyes off her, Sue included.

Emily is one of those people who goes through life blissfully unaware that her smile shakes the earth. She has utterly no idea that the way her hair falls across her shoulders makes Sue’s whole body fizz, the same way it falls across her pillow in the mornings. And she couldn’t possibly know that the way the red satin of her dress clings to the shape of her hips is causing a heat to rise in Sue’s abdomen, a warmth that’s spreading to the rest of her body, the tops of her thighs prickling with it.

Lavinia squeezes her hand, and when Sue tears her eyes from Emily, the other Dickinson sister is smirking at her affectionately.

“What?” Sue says, aware that she sounds more than a little embarrassed.

“Feeling a little hot under the collar there, Susan?”

The pink shade in Sue’s cheeks turns crimson, and she’s unable to deny that that’s the reason her palms are sweating. She can feel them in Vinnie’s hands, damp and a little clammy.

“Don’t Susan me,” she whispers, and looks back over to the stage, where Emily smiles as she makes a joke about the pervasive teenage boy smell that inhabited Austin’s room for the better part of his adolescence. “So I’m attracted to my wife, big deal.”

“Okay, defensive,” Vinnie grins. “Going through a dry spell?”

“What? Vin, that’s - you - shut up.”

Lavinia chuckles to herself, as if her psychic powers and intuition had already told her as much.

“Thought so. How long’s it been?”

“Lavinia,” Sue hisses, trying her best to use her teacher voice without creeping above a whisper.

“C’mon Sue,” she says, jabbing her in the rib. “We have no secrets.”

“I’d love it if we did,” Sue mumbles sourly.

“How long?”

Sue thinks, back to spring, their last date night before they were parents of two. Emily had undressed her slowly, batting Sue’s hands away when she tried to help. Sue had gripped the sheets while Emily’s mouth had made its way to the pillowy skin of her thighs, and left bruises there, blooming purple under her tongue and the gentle scrape of her teeth.

“Well,” she sighs, “Mattie’s almost four months old, so - ”

“Months?” Lavinia says, eyes wide, and her voice rises above its previously low volume, earning a few glances from the guests around them.

Sue elbows her in the side and looks to Emily on stage, who is still speaking, totally unaware of the intimate details Vinnie is currently prying out of her.

“We have two small children, Vin. It makes things - difficult.”

“Four months?”

“Y’know, other people don’t know nearly this much about their siblings’ sex lives,” She mumbles, rolling her eyes.

“Oh my god” mutters Vinnie, with more than a little pity in her voice. She’s obviously not listening. “I can’t even imagine.”

“Did you not just claim you were done with men?”

“I meant for relationships - Jesus, Sue. I’m not a nun.”

Lavinia Dickinson was, most definitely, not a nun.

It wasn’t that they had forgotten about it. In Sue’s case that was decidedly not the problem. The opportunity just didn’t present itself too often anymore. And when it did, the moment was usually cut painfully short by an infant’s nightmares and complaints of monsters under the bed.

But on nights like tonight, when Emily glowed with happiness and her skin shimmered in a way that made Sue want to sink her teeth into it, she wished she could find a way to make it a priority.

“So if you’d all join me in raising your glasses,” Emily says from the stage, her voice bouncing gently around the marble walls. “To Austin and Jane.”

The room echoes her, and a round of applause, much more enthusiastic than the smattering of claps for her dad, sounds throughout the ballroom. She makes eye contact with Sue and grins proudly, her cheeks flushing. Sue loves her completely.

“Are you guys staying after the wedding?” Vinnie asked breezily, and Sue notes that she gets over the initial shock of her admission pretty quickly. This family and their talent for overreacting.

“Yeah, we’re staying until Sunday,” she says, her eyes remaining on Emily as she skips down the steps, her hips swaying her dress from side to side. Sue’s stomach twinges with wanting. “Why?”

Vinnie seems to ponder something for a moment, then lets out a deliberately heavy sigh.

“I’ve been meaning to ask if I can spend a day with the kids. I wanna get in some quality Aunt Vinnie time while Mattie’s so little.”

“Yeah, sure,” Sue says absently, distracted by the slit in the fabric climbing Emily’s leg. It hitches up, catching as she turns towards her, exposing a canvas of smooth, tanned skin and Sue doesn’t even try to hide the awestruck look on her face. “Whenever, just let us know.”

“How about the day after the wedding,” Vinnie pinches her aggressively on the arm, so that she’s forced to pull her gaze away. “Sue!”

“Hm, what?”

“On Saturday. I’m taking the kids out for the day. So that you and Emily can have time to yourselves. Alone. In a five-star hotel. How much more do I need to spell this out for you?”

Sue stares at her sister-in-law, her mouth ajar, and her mind racing through all the things her and Emily could do over the course of a whole day.

“You’re serious?”

“Obviously,” Vinnie shrugs, her irises rolling towards the ceiling as they so often did.

“You really don’t have to - ”

“Sue, just say thank you, before I think too much about you guys having sex and change my mind.”

~

“Am I in trouble or something?” Emily asks warily, as Sue pulls her by the hand, leading her down the hallway of the hotel.

“No,” Sue says, not looking at her, but looking almost frantically at each door they pass.

“Was my speech okay? It wasn’t too long, was it? I know we timed it but you know how I like to ramble.”

“Your speech was great, honey,” Sue says, and tries the handle of one door (locked), then another (a cleaning closet, with a full mop bucket in the corner), and finally succeeds on the third - a cloakroom, that Emily notices is mostly empty, given that August has turned out to be an exceptionally warm month in Rhode Island. No coats in sight.

“I feel like I found a flow at some point, y’know?” Emily continues, barely noticing as Sue pulls her inside and closes the door behind them, clicking the lock. Before she can run through what she believes were the high points of her first best man speech, as well as her potential areas for improvement, she’s pushed forcefully against the wall, her back flat against the wallpaper, and Sue’s lips collide with her own. She lets out a guttural moan, completely unconsciously, as Sue’s teeth trap her bottom lip and pull gently. She had no idea she was so hungry.

“Hi,” she says softly, when Sue releases her lip.

“Hi,” Sue grins, and uses her hands to firmly pin Emily’s hips to the wall.

“What was that for?”

“Well,” Sue whispers, and turns her attention to Emily’s neck, nudging her head to the left with her nose and trailing her tongue up the line of muscle that reaches from Emily’s collarbone, and joins at the base of her ear.

“We have twenty minutes until dinner,” Emily’s abdomen burns where Sue’s thumb is drawing small circles over the fabric of her dress.

“The kids are with your family,” she nips at Emily’s earlobe, taking it into her mouth, and her breath is hot and sweet. God, Emily thinks for a moment that she might come just from Sue’s voice in her ear, dripping like honey, making her hot enough to combust.

“And you looked so beautiful up there,” Sue says, and Emily’s knee starts to tremble when she begins to play with the slit at her thigh, fingers teasing the skin until Emily’s hips buck towards her. “I just had to have you.”

Fuck.

“We could do a lot,” Emily whispers, trying to control the movement of her hips, and maybe not give herself away as being complete fucking putty in her wife’s hands. “In twenty minutes.”

“Yeah,” Sue breathes, and her voice creeps into the whisper, the briefest whine escaping her throat. She uses the flat of her palm to push against Emily’s thigh, spreading her legs a little wider. Her other hand still has Emily pinned to the wall, and even if she could push her way out of it she wouldn't want to. She likes it, this pressure She holds her under.

“Anything specific in mind?” Sue asks, and uses her free hand to run a thumb down the line of Emily’s jaw, then draw down until it’s at the base of her throat, applying the smallest amount of pressure there now too. Emily feels a rush of something hot and urgent in her abdomen and groans, the sound surprising even her with its desperation.

“God, anything. Do whatever you want with me,” she pants, and hears a twinkling laugh bubble up in Sue’s own throat.

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say,” and before Emily’s brain can catch up, Sue is on her knees, pushing her skirt up impatiently. Lips meet the skin at her hipbone, and soothe and kiss before sucking hard enough to bruise, a tongue greedily flicking over the bursting blood vessels. Fingers tangle in the hem of her underwear, lace catching on Sue’s manicured nails, and she tugs them out of the way with her own hand to allow Sue better access, more space, a blank canvas to paint whatever she wants between her navel and the insides of her thighs.

“I love leaving marks on you,” Sue says, barely audible as she mumbles between kisses to Emily’s stomach, “in places only I can see.”

“Me too,” Emily manages. Miraculous, really, given that most of her energy is focussed on keeping herself upright. If it weren’t for Sue’s palm, pressing hard on her belly to keep her locked in place, she’d probably crumple into a whimpering mess on the floor.

“I was watching you, in this dress,” Sue says, peeling her underwear from her now, and drawing it slowly down her legs, until Emily can carefully step out of it. “And I was thinking about when you first wore it for me.”

“Hm. Our anniversary?”

“Mmhmm,” Sue hums. She pushes the red skirt of the dress up, higher above her thighs, and bunching at her stomach until Emily is exposed. She draws a hand down and lifts her leg so it’s draped gently over her shoulder, Emily propped up between her and the wall.

“You came on top of me when I fucked you, d’you remember?”

“Yes,” Emily breathes.

“Think you can do it again for me?”

She tries to answer the same way but this time nothing makes it out of her mouth. All she can muster is a shaky nod, Sue’s breath against her making her head swim, her heart pounding in her temples.

“Good girl,” Sue mutters, and then her tongue is on her, running up the length of her so suddenly that Emily has to brace herself, her hand darting to the nearest closet to keep her from buckling.

“Fuck,” she utters, expletives the only words within reach. Sue’s tongue draws concentrated circles and a hand grips her hip, already jerking out of her control to seek more. She comes quickly, but Sue doesn’t stop, diligent as she is in all things. As Emily twitches with the aftershocks, barely able to catch her breath, Sue stands and fills her with her fingers, drawing a gasp from her, a rush of air ballooning in her lungs.

“Oh my god,” Emily groans, and arches her back against the wall, while Sue pins her in place with the press of her body, hips together and legs entangled. In between firm thrusts, she marvels at the way Sue can unpick her like this, gently teasing at her fibres and tugging them loose until she’s unraveled and uncomplicated. The way Emily wants her has always been simple. A basic primal need for her touch, the way she needs air to breathe and light to see.

Sue is whispering in her ear now, but the words aren’t distinct. At every other moment in her life, Emily values words over everything. When it comes to Sue in moments like this, all she can do is feel. Breath on her neck, in her ear, on her thighs, hot, and sticky with wanting. Warmth at the base of her spine, at her core, in her chest. The relentless pace of Sue’s fingers, pressing at her insides, finding the soft parts of her, and whispering words of encouragement as Emily comes closer and closer to lighting on fire.

Later, they will distill, into something tangible that she can commit to a page, to a scrap of paper, anything in sight. But for now, all that matters is the scrape of Sue’s teeth at her ear and the hand that makes its way up to her chest. Her voice swims in Emily’s ears, and she tries her best to listen.

“I missed you,” Sue whispers against her, “I missed the way you feel, and the way you sound.”

Emily places a hand on her shoulder in a desperate attempt to get more traction, feel her as much as possible. Sue takes the cue and quickens her pace, fingers slick and confident.

“God, Em you’re so wet,” she moans, and Emily nods, pushing herself down into Sue’s hand. “Have you missed me too?”

“Yeah,” Emily sighs, and hears above the shallow panting how her own voice is steeped in desperation. She’s missed the way Sue fills her, the way her touch makes her body boil, the way their hearts beat in step with each other, knocking at their ribs when their chests are pressed together. But as Sue builds her to a crescendo, her insides molten and pulsing, all she can manage is a moan, dug out from somewhere in her belly, hoarse and in a language she knows Sue understands.

“Are you gonna come for me, honey?” Sue plies, and her voice is thick with desire, willing Emily to let go and melt over her.

“Yeah, I - fuck, Sue - ”

“You want to?” Emily nods urgently, and screws her eyes shut in anticipation. “What do you need?”

“Harder,” Emily breathes, her fingers pressing into Sue’s shoulders, her leg hooking around Sue’s for stability.

Sue complies, and thrusts deeper, faster, desperate as Emily to find her release.

“Come for me Em,” she says, her voice low and thrumming with heat at Emily’s ear. “I want to feel you come, please.”

When Sue presses her again, curling her fingers inside her, the other hand at the base of her neck, Emily splinters, cries out so suddenly that Sue brings a thumb to her lips, and Emily’s sure someone back in the party will have heard her. It’s a wonder they don’t all feel the earth move with the force of how badly Emily wants her.

“Good girl,” Sue says again, and Emily whimpers in reply, hips still bucking as Sue’s fingers keep pulsing, slowing in time with their heartbeats. When she regains some energy, some feeling of permanence in her body, she brings her hands to Sue’s face and brings their lips together, kissing her gently as the crashing feeling dissipates.

“I love you,” she says, always the only words she can grasp, because it’s the most basic, fundamental part of her. This love she feels for Sue the lynchpin that holds the many pieces of her together.

“I love you,” Sue says, before pressing one last deep kiss to her lips and drawing her fingers away, trailing them down Emily’s thigh as she goes.

“Sorry we don’t do that more often,” Emily smiles, and leans her head back against the wall.

“It’s no one’s fault,” Sue starts, a worried crease forming between her eyebrows, which Emily immediately soothes with her thumb.

“No,” she says, and smirks fondly at her. “I mean I’m sorry, like, to the universe. It’s a crime we don’t do that every minute of the day.”

Sue giggles and everything is right.

“Yeah? Well, lucky for you, Vinnie’s babysitting all day on Saturday. So we have plenty of time to make it up to the universe,” Sue says, and presses her knee gently in between Emily’s legs, earning one last shiver and the slightest squeak of Emily’s voice. Sue laughs at her, softly, barely audible above the sound of their breath together. One day, there’ll be a way to inject that sound into her bloodstream, administered like medicine for any and all ailments. For now, it’s enough that she gets to hear it, and kiss the forehead of the person it came from, with an ache between her legs that will linger for the rest of the evening.

A few minutes before dinner, Sue sends her back out to the party, having smoothed down her dress and fixed her hair. She follows not too far behind, and Emily is only a little worried that anyone paying attention might guess where they’ve been.

She eats duck a l’orange with cutlery more expensive than the silverware in her childhood home, and thinks of all the things her and Sue have to catch up on.

Notes:

obscene amount of italics in this chapter, spent 45 minutes doing it and then ao3 crashed 🙃

if anyone is still out there i am grateful for u and any comments and such you choose to leave. maybe there’ll be another chapter to this in a year or so, looks like i’m stuck with this special interest for life hehehehe

Notes:

This could honestly go on forever so buckle up I guess!

Thank you for reading!!