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Magda has always mistrusted new beginnings.
They invite reflection. They ask questions she has spent a lifetime learning how not to answer. New Year’s Eve, in particular, carries with it a peculiar affront, the insistence that one must account for what has been lost, what has survived, what has failed to die when it should have. And Magda has always, up until her fortieth year on this earth, refused to partake.
The tavern is full tonight.
Laughter ricochets off the walls, bodies pressed closer than usual, this town of wayward misfits have gathered in a loose, hopeful defiance of everything that has brought them here. Music hums low and imperfect, someone’s hand slaps the bar in time with a song that isn’t quite remembered correctly. The air smells of beer and heat and a whimsy that is far too old for every single patron in this place.
Magda sits at the table near the window. Heather is beside her, and that is both the problem and the miracle because it was Heather who asked her here tonight. It was Heather who had insisted it might be fun. It might be something in the shape of normality, even. Magda had begrudged, pouted, even. But then Heather had tilted her head and those bright blue eyes of hers had become so bright and so blue that she’d capitulated instantly.
Magda has grown used to Heather’s presence in increments the way that one grows used to light returning after a long winter. First, she’d convinced herself it was merely coincidence. Then, she argued with herself that perhaps it was just a habit. But now, eight months into the younger woman’s arrival to the town Magda can only see it for what it truly is; necessity. Somewhere along the way, between botanical excursions at dawn and evenings spent huddled around a roaring fire trading novel recommendations, Magda stopped imagining her days without Heather in them.
Tonight, Heather wears a soft jumper, the colour a warm marigold, and when she laughs aloud at the increasingly drunken dancing all around them, Magda feels the sound in her chest like a struck bell. It startles her every time. The intensity of it. The way her body reacts before thought can intervene. Because that is precisely her reaction every time that Heather laughs and she is around to hear the bright, tinkling noise, see the way that it causes her pale skin to flush pink and her eyes to gloss with delight.
She tells herself she is being foolish. She tells herself this is transference, proximity, merely loneliness dressed up as something more dangerous. She tells herself she has survived worse temptations than this.
And yet.
Heather’s knee brushes hers beneath the table. Heather’s eyes sparkle at her, telling her that it was deliberate. Magda stills, breath catching, every nerve in her body lighting up as if the contact has rearranged her internal geography.
This is how wars begin. With small, unnoticed border crossings, she thinks.
Heather turns toward her fully, eyes bright, cheeks flushed from the warmth and noise of the room. “Are you alright?” she asks, voice pitched just for Magda.
Magda nods, too quickly. “Yes.”
A lie. Or perhaps an incomplete truth.
She is unravelling. She is standing on the edge of something she has no training for. She is confronted with a truth that she has spent her whole life trying to bury; she has a heart, and it demands to be honoured. She watches Heather speak to Kerry, to Graham, her hands expressive, her kindness unforced, and something inside Magda twists painfully with a feeling she does not want to name.
Discomfort. Agitation. Jealousy. Desire. Shame. Fear. Ache. Need. Love.
The word hovers, unspoken, terrifying.
The countdown will begin soon. She knows this. She can feel it building, the collective leaning forward toward midnight, toward noise and kisses and declarations. The thought of Heather turning to someone else at twelve, anyone else and for whatever reason, makes Magda’s stomach tighten in a way that is both irrational and absolute.
She cannot sit through it. She cannot bear the idea of Heather’s smile and Heather’s eyes being the first thing anyone else sees as they step into the new year.
She leans in, close enough that Heather can hear her without effort. “Will you come outside with me?” she asks softly. “Just for a moment. The stars should be visible tonight.”
Heather looks surprised. Then something soft crosses her face. Something hopeful.
“I’d like that,” she says.
Magda rises, offering her hand before she can change her mind.
Heather follows Magda outside without asking why. Magda wonders if Heather knows just how dangerous that is.
She wonders if Heather cares.
The night air is cold and clean, shocking after the heat and noise of the tavern. It steals her breath for a moment. Next to her, Heather reacts to the change in temperature with a soft laugh and by hugging her arms around herself as the door closes behind them, muting the sound of the crowd.
They stand together beneath the open sky. Mystery Bay stretches quiet around them, the sea dark and patient beyond the trees. Above, the stars are sharp and innumerable, scattered like a promise no one has ever quite kept.
Magda has always been able to withstand noise.
In Moscow, in safe houses, in corridors that hummed with footsteps and unspoken threats, she learned early that sound is not the same thing as truth. Sound can be a distraction, a mask, an engineered weather system meant to conceal what matters. She has lived through celebrations that were nothing but propaganda and funerals that were nothing but performance. She has smiled at the right moments and kept her eyes empty. She has endured the heat of crowded rooms without ever truly being in them.
But tonight, with Heather beside her under an open sky, the noise abandons them. The mask falls away.
The tavern’s lights bleed faintly through the windows, a warm rectangle in the dark. Inside there will be laughter, chanting, bodies pressed together in the intimacy of ritual. Outside the air is sharp, honest, cold enough to make breathing a deliberate act. Magda stands with her hands buried in her coat pockets and feels guilt in her gut at her selfishness. Heather’s beauty and sweetness radiate brighter than any star tonight, and she’d deliberately pulled her away from the adoring crowd in the tavern because she’d felt the need to be warmed by Heather’s light all on her own.
The truth is, she could not bear to watch Heather be…claimed by anyone else at midnight. Not even in jest, not even with a friendly peck to her cheek. Magda could not bear the possibility that Heather would turn her face toward someone else, would laugh and kiss and move on, while Magda remained immobile beside her, paralyzed by her own, unnamed desire for her.
The truth is, Magda’s body does not understand the rules of this place yet. Even after two years of living here, the longest she has ever lived anywhere in her adult life. Still her body believes in the old rules: take what you want, or it will be taken from you. Keep what is yours, or it will be lost. Do not allow your heart to become a hostage.
She had once thought she could live without that organ entirely.
Then Heather arrived with her quiet grief, her bright eyes, her careful courage, and Magda’s heart began to behave like a traitor, like an animal that had caught the scent of something it had been starving for. And so it hunted, it prowled, it kept Magda awake at all hours of the day and night, ravenous for recognition, demanding satiation.
Magda turns her head slightly. Heather is watching the sky, her face tipped up, breath fogging faintly at her lips. There is something unbearably tender about the shape of her in this cold, shoulders slightly hunched against the wind, hands tucked into her sleeves, hair lifted at the ends by the sea air. She looks like all the hope in the world that refused to be extinguished.
Magda has seen many kinds of beauty in her life. Exoctic women. Cultured women. Wild women. Conniving, clever, esoteric, sensual, erratic women. But none like her.
Heather’s beauty is gentle, whimsical, soft; the kind that makes you want to be better. She is startled by the thought. It is a dangerous thing, wanting to be good for someone. It implies permanence. It implies accountability. It implies a future you cannot run from. It implies the weight and responsibility of another’s heart.
Magda’s throat tightens.
She thinks of the way Heather has woven herself into her days without force. The way she asked questions that were not interrogations. The way she laughed at Magda’s dry remarks as if they were gifts, as if humour itself were an intimacy. The way she watched Magda with such attention that Magda began to feel, absurdly, that she existed more solidly when Heather looked at her. All her life, Magda has been seen as useful. As formidable. As something to be feared or desired in a transactional way.
For the first time in her life, she is looked at as someone. As the whole, not the parts which will inevitably be extracted for their usefulness. It should not unravel her. But it does.
The cold has seeped into her boots, into the soles of her feet, but under her skin there is heat, an almost feverish restlessness that has nothing to do with the weather. She shifts her weight, tries to quiet her thoughts. She tells herself she is not here to confess. Not tonight. That would be madness. That would be indulgence. That would be weakness.
She has already endangered Heather by existing in this town with her past.
What right does she have to bring Heather closer to her?
Heather turns toward her then, as if sensing the ferocity of Magda’s silence. Their eyes meet. Heather’s gaze is intense in a way that makes Magda’s breath stutter. There is no flirtation in it, no coyness. Only that raw, unguarded feeling Heather cannot help leaking through the seams.
“You look like you’re thinking too much,” Heather says softly, a faint smile at the corner of her mouth. It is an affectionate observation.
Magda swallows. “Perhaps,” she concedes.
Heather’s smile grows, then softens. “You alright?”
Magda forces her breath to remain even. “Yes.”
Heather studies her for a moment, and Magda hates how easily Heather reads what she tries to conceal.
“Magda,” Heather says quietly, and there is something in her tone, a gentleness that feels like a hand at the back of Magda’s neck. “You don’t have to be alone with it, whatever it is.”
Alone with it. As if it is a…thing. As if Magda’s longing is a creature crouched in her chest, talons sunk into muscle, refusing to be dislodged. If only it were just that. That would be easier to discard.
“I hardly know what you mean,” Magda tries.
Heather narrows her eyes at her. “Yes, you do. We’re friends, aren’t we?” She waits until Magda nods. “Good. Friends don’t let each other suffer alone. Even if our friends are Russian and live for suffering,” she adds as a playful tease. Something to soften the edge of her care with.
Magda’s fingers curl tighter inside her pockets. She watches Heather’s mouth as she speaks, watches the small plume of breath in the cold, and is hit, suddenly, mercilessly, by the desire to close the distance and kiss her. To taste that warmth. To end this terrible suspended ache.
Her body leans forward a fraction before she catches herself. Heather’s eyes flicker down to Magda’s mouth, and then back up. Oh.
Oh.
Magda’s heart rate increases as she notices the way that Heather’s cheeks flush. The way that her eyes darken. The way that hope softens the corners of her mouth. And Magda is struck by the fact that Heather is not just tender. Heather is brave. Braver than any rival spy Magda has bested. Braver than Magda. Heather, sweet, gentle Heather is standing here in the cold, heart exposed, waiting, hoping.
But Magda cannot bear the weight of such hope. And so, she turns her face back to the sky, as if distance might save her. The stars glitter with indifferent beauty. She has spent years looking up at skies in foreign places, convincing herself that no matter where she is, the stars are the same, the world is the same, her loneliness is portable. Tonight, the stars feel like witnesses.
Magda exhales slowly, and with that breath she feels a shift, tiny, internal, but seismic. The knowledge that she cannot keep doing this. Not the avoidance. Not the half-living. Not the silent suffering that Heather can sense but not name.
She is tired of being a woman who survives everything except happiness. She turns back to Heather.
“Heather,” she begins. “I asked you out here because…,” she falters.
Because what? Because she needed air? Because she wanted stars? Because she wanted an excuse to be alone with Heather without calling it what it is?
Heather waits. Her expression is open, but there is a tightness at the corners, a fear that Magda will retreat again into cleverness and distance. Magda watches that fear and something in her breaks.
“Because I wanted this moment with you,” Magda says quietly. “Away from everyone else.”
Heather’s breath catches, audible.
Magda continues, voice lower. “And because…,” she nervously shoves her lenses up her nose, “...there is no one else I would rather cross the bridge of time from this year into the next year with, than you.”
Heather’s eyes widen slightly, then soften as she takes a step closer.
“Magda,” she murmurs, barely a sound. “Are you - ”
Magda lifts a hand, not to silence her, but to steady herself. Her fingers hover between them like a fragile bridge.
“I must apologize. I…I don’t know what I’m doing,” Magda admits. The admission is quiet but enormous. “And I am unused to being so…ill-prepared.” The look that she gives Heather is pained, agonizing, in its contriteness. She takes a deep breath. “I only know that when you are near me, the world feels quieter. Less hostile. And when you are not, I feel the absence like a wound.”
Heather’s eyes shine. Her mouth trembles, but she doesn’t speak. She seems to instinctually know that Magda needs this, the space and time to let the words tumble out messily so that she may arrange them before Heather.
Magda looks at her and feels the urge to run rise up in her body like panic, this is too much, this is too real, this is how people get hurt. Magda can feel the world tightening toward midnight. And in the cold beneath the stars, with Heather’s eyes on her like a prayer, Magda finally allows herself to want.
When the clock strikes twelve, Magda does not hear it as sound.
What reaches her is not the number, not the cheer that rises from the tavern behind them like a breaking wave, not the collective exhale of a town relieved to have survived another year on scraps. All of that arrives muffled, distant, as though the world has placed a careful hand over its own mouth, unwilling to interrupt what is unfolding here beneath the open sky.
What Magda hears instead is Heather’s breath.
It fogs faintly in the cold, the softest visible proof of life, of warmth, of a body standing so close now that Magda can feel the subtle shift of it, the way Heather’s weight settles differently on her feet, as if some internal decision has already been made. The stars above them seem sharper at midnight, older somehow, as though they have leaned closer to witness this particular convergence.
Magda has lived her life trained against moments like this.
She has been taught that tenderness is an exposure, that love is a language spoken only by people who can afford to be broken, that to name what you want is to give someone else the map to your undoing. She has survived by holding herself apart from the things that would have made her soft, and yet here she is, standing at the edge of a year she does not recognize, with a woman beside her who has undone her not with force, but with tenderness.
Heather turns toward her fully now.
There is no question in her gaze, no demand, only that open, devastating attentiveness that Magda has come to recognize as Heather’s most dangerous quality. The way she offers her presence to Magda as if it costs nothing to do so, as if staying is the most natural act in the world. The look on her face is luminous and afraid all at once, hope threaded through restraint, and Magda feels the last of her carefully constructed defenses falter under the weight of it.
She lifts her hand.
The movement is slow, deliberate, as if she is wading through water, as if the air itself has thickened around them. Her fingers tremble because she understands, with sudden and terrible clarity, that once she does this there will be no returning to the woman she was before. Her palm finds Heather’s cheek, warm despite the cold, and Heather leans into the touch immediately, instinctively, as though her body has been waiting for this permission.
Magda’s thumb rests beneath Heather’s eye. Her beautiful, brilliant blue eye. Heather’s eyelashes flutter and Magda can feel the air that they create against the tip of her thumb.
For a moment Magda does nothing else, simply holds her there, memorizing the shape of her face, the steadiness of her breath, the reality of her. She thinks, fleetingly, irrationally, of all the nights she has spent staring at unfamiliar ceilings, convincing herself that solitude was a kind of safety. The thought feels absurd now.
She leans in.
Their lips meet so gently that it barely feels like movement, more like alignment, like two things finally settling into the place they have been circling for lifetimes. Magda feels time stretch thin around them, the seconds elongating until they no longer matter, until the past and future loosen their grip and there is only this breath, this warmth, this quiet miracle of contact. She feels Heather’s hands on her body, long fingertips resting against her waist. She hears the gentle sigh escape Heather’s mouth to tickle at her lips as Heather sways on the tips of her toes, leaning into Magda fully. Magda pulls back only far enough to speak, their foreheads still touching, their noses brushing, her voice low and unguarded in a way she does not recognize as her own.
“I love you,” she whispers.
The words leave her without ornament, without defense, stripped of everything except truth. She does not soften them, does not qualify them, does not retreat into irony or cleverness or distance. She lets them stand as they are, bare and irrevocable.
Heather’s hands tighten at her waist, her lips part as though she wants to respond, but Magda has not completed her confession just yet. Magda’s thumb moves across Heather’s cheek, silently begging for the blonde’s patience just a moment longer. And Heather, who has always understood Magda’s silences better than anyone, better than Magda herself, grants her that mercy.
“I have loved you in ways I did not have language for, and in ways I tried very hard not to understand. You make the world feel less cruel,” Magda says, her voice roughening. “You make me feel as though the war inside me has finally paused, and I do not want to return to who I was before that. I don’t want to survive anymore. I want to choose. And I am choosing you.”
She does not ask for anything in return. She waits, open and exposed beneath the stars, her heart finally laid down where Heather can see it.
Heather exhales slowly, deliberately, as if anchoring herself to the moment so it cannot slip away.
“I have loved you from the moment I met you,” she whispers against Magda’s lips. “I was so…broken, afraid, drowning in my own grief and confusion,” she shakes her head and tears gather in her eyes as she recounts her emotional state when she arrived in the town less than a year ago. “I didn’t think I could ever be happy again. And then I met you and all of what I’d tried to ignore, tried to bury in myself for years,” she dips her head in shame, “you forced me to confront it. And I was afraid, Magda, I was so terrified. Of how much I wanted you, how I couldn’t ignore it. Of how much it meant to want you.”
Heather's hands drift from Magda’s waist up to her face. She holds her steady. “You are the only person I wanted to kiss at midnight. I just didn’t know how, or if you would even welcome it.”
Magda’s face flushes between Heather’s long, soft fingers. “Of course I would welcome it,” she murmurs. As if Heather’s insecurities were the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard, because they were. Her dark eyes roam the face of this woman, this beautiful, sweet, loving woman and she cannot contemplate ever denying Heather, well, anything, let alone an act of affection.
Heather giggles against Magda’s lips. And she leans forward, closing the space between them with a confidence that is wonderfully unexpected and kisses Magda again. The kiss opens slowly, naturally, as if it has been unfolding for months beneath every shared look and unfinished sentence, with every near touch and longing glance, and Magda’s hands slide to her waist, drawing her closer with a possessiveness that makes Heather’s knees weaken.
Heather’s back is pushed up against the wall, just to the right of the window. And she moans as Magda presses the full length and girth of her body against her. Her hands slip from Magda’s face to her hair and she feels the tip of Magda’s tongue teasing her upper lip.
“Wait,” she whispers, breathless.
Magda pulls back. Her dark brown eyes have turned black, against the night sky they look like twin black holes; swirling, all consuming, endless in their depth.
Heather’s fingers twirl Magda’s hair between them. “Not here. I also want you all to myself," she excitedly confesses. "Come home with me?" Her lips are swollen and her cheeks are so bright they glow in the dark.
Magda’s eyes soften beneath her tinted lenses. “Yes,” she whispers.
Heather exhales like a prayer answered. She takes Magda’s hands in her own, tugging them decisively forward, and they quietly depart from the tavern, wearing matching smiles.
Above them, the stars twinkle knowingly; ancient giants bear witness to the quiet beginning of everything between two newfound lovers.