Work Text:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
– Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
I. SPRING
Jester loves April.
First of all, April Fool’s Day? The absolute best holiday, bar none, no matter what her roommate Beau says about it not even being an officially recognized holiday and blah, blah, blah. She’s definitely just bitter Jester destroyed her in their prank war two years in a row and counting. But April Fool’s Day was practically custom-made for Jester Lavorre. Woe to every friend, acquaintance, and shopkeeper within a six-mile radius of her.
Other good things about April: watching and smelling the world come back to life around her. Waking up every morning with the fluttery hope that maybe it’ll be bright and warm and sunny again today! The smell and sound of fresh rain. Giggling at the way people run from the fresh rain, backpacks or windbreakers tented above their heads. The chocolate that pops up everywhere when Easter draws near.
And Easter cakes! Jester loves her job, she really does, but it is her strong opinion that as a “cake decorator,” she should get to do more actual cake decorating and less baking. She doesn’t hate baking—far from it. But it’s so formulaic sometimes, and involves so much waiting. Decorating though, is art, is creation, is finely controlled chaos. When holidays like Easter come around and more people come in looking for custom Jesus or bunny or stripey egg cakes or whatever it is Easter celebrates, that’s when Jester is happiest.
Scratch that. Jester is happiest when the Thursday work day ends, when she waves goodbye to her boss and glides out of the bakery, still intoxicated by the smell of warm butter; the impressed oohs and aahs of a satisfied customer; the purple swirls of flowers she created again and again.
She’s happiest when she’s waiting for the pedestrian light to go green, grinning up at the gentle rain drizzling through shafts of sunlight, like Mother Nature is playing pranks of her own. She’s happiest when she barges into the independent, overpriced coffee shop across from her workplace and there he is, sitting at the small round table in the corner with his laptop open beside an empty cup, just like he is every week. Waiting for her.
Jester creeps through the shop—she’s stealthy as fuck, okay, it doesn’t matter that the other customers are staring—and when she gets to where Fjord sits, his back turned to the door (rookie mistake), she leaps and slams her hands on both his shoulders.
“Boo.”
Fjord jumps, knocking over his empty paper cup with a low yelp.
“Holy hell, Jester.”
She slides into the seat opposite him, grinning wide. “Got you.”
“That you did.” His mouth quirks. He leans back in his chair, scrubbing at his face. He looks exhausted, even though he’s the kind of unfairly gorgeous person who never gets bags under his eyes. His hair is slightly rumpled today, though, which for Fjord is the equivalent of being a scruffy mess. He’s more meticulous about his personal grooming than pretty much anyone else she knows.
Still, it looks kind of cute on him like this—damp and tousled, stray locks of dark hair caressing his forehead, his undercut starting to grow out a little. It looks softer, somehow.
Fjord notices her staring.
“The rain,” he explains, dragging fingers across the top of his head, all self-conscious. “Messed it all up.”
“Don’t worry so much,” says Jester, propping her chin on her hands. “You look very pretty like this.”
“Okay, sure. I appreciate that.” Fjord smiles. Picks up the cup he’d knocked over earlier. “How was work?”
“Fun! We’re getting a lot of custom orders now, so I get to work on those all day.” Her grin dims a little. “You look super shit, though. Were your students mean to you?”
“Wow. Thought you said I looked pretty.”
“You always look pretty. But you also look super tired. So, like, super shit.”
Fjord rolls his eyes. “My students were fine. And before you ask, so was my advisor.”
“Okaaay...” Jester narrows her eyes. “But just tell me if anyone is being mean. I can beat them up for you. Defend your honour.”
“Please don’t.”
“Or I can put bottles of Pepsi into their bags with, like, the cap a little bit unscrewed, so then sticky soda will spill all over their stuff and they’ll be really sad about it.”
“Yeah, don’t do that either.”
“But your honour, Fjord.” She clenches her fist to emphasize the word honour.
Fjord bites back a grin. “I appreciate the thought, but my honour is still intact, for now. No one’s being mean.” He sighs. “I’m just frustrated with myself, is all. I feel like I’m getting nowhere with this—” He waves his hand helplessly at his laptop. “—this whole thing, you know?”
The thing is, Fjord is super smart. He’s this grad student researching really difficult, really important stuff at the university. He spends half his time in a lab, and he’s an amazing TA, and he still thinks he’s not doing good enough. Jester wishes he could see himself the way everyone else sees him. She doesn’t know how to make him do that, though.
So she pops up behind him, glares at the screen. She has no idea what the fuck she’s reading. There are lots of numbers, but also letters.
Jester squeezes his shoulder. “But Obi-Wan Kenobi, you must unlock the secret of waterbending,” she says gravely.
“I—I don’t even know how to unpack that crossover.” He cocks a brow. “And you know I’m studying chemical oceanography, not—”
“Bloodbending,” Jester says, nodding with understanding.
Fjord sighs. But she catches the corner of his mouth dart up, some of the tension leaking from his shoulders. She grins. Pulls back her hand.
“You’re the smartest person I know, Fjord,” she says. “So don’t be mean to yourself. ’Cause, you know, then I’ll have to beat you up, or spill soda into your bag.”
“To defend my honour?” he asks, not hiding his smile now.
“To defend your honour,” she agrees, clenching her fist again. “Now I should go buy a drink before that one really pissy barista kicks us out.”
“Good idea.” He rubs at his eyes again.
As she turns to head for the counter, though, Fjord twists around in his seat, and brushes her fingers with his. She stops. His hand is always so much warmer than hers, the skin of his palm work-worn and callused.
“Jester,” he says, and there it is. This funny squirmy feeling she gets in her ribcage whenever he says her name. “Thank you.”
She smiles, and doesn’t ask what he means. “We look out for each other, right?” she says.
“Always.” He winks. He looks like a dork.
Jester goes to the counter to order. She picks out the sweetest drink they have, which is still not very sweet so she also has to add a lot of sugar, while the barista looks on in vague horror. You’d think he’d get used to it by now. She also gets two blueberry muffins and another coffee (one milk, no sugar) and when she returns to the table she sets the coffee and one of the muffins in front of Fjord. He’s recycled his empty cup while she was gone.
He raises his eyebrows at her when she sits down, but doesn’t complain like he always used to whenever she bought him stuff. He just takes a sip of coffee, and shoots her the kind of grin that warms her far more effectively than the April sun ever does.
Jester does work in her sketchbook and Fjord does work on his laptop, and outside the sun gets swallowed by grey and then by inky blue night. The rain has stopped, but Fjord’s hair still looks all soft and rumpled and pretty.
II. SUMMER
It turns out that summer means Jester gets to see a lot more of Beau (yay) but a lot less of Fjord (boo). She expects this will change by this time next year, when Beau will finally have wrapped up her turbulent career as a wayward college student and Fjord will hopefully have completed and defended his thesis, whatever that means. A happy, floaty burst bubbles up inside her, thinking about it this way—framing it as a given that her friends will still be here with her in a year, or two, or three. Jester’s always been a fan of unpredictability, but she’s discovering maybe having some constants can be pretty great, too.
Jester’s own schedule doesn’t change with the rising frequency of sunny days, because Jester is a working woman not bound by the bizarre demands of academia. Her boss is trusting her more and more, to the point that Jester now has her own set of keys to the bakery so she can close up shop on the days he leaves early.
Most evenings Beau drives to the bakery to pick Jester up after work, and they grab tacos or go watch whatever corny rom-com or superhero movie is playing in theatres that week. Other times they head down to the port to meet Fjord on the days he’s working on one of the school’s research vessels. When they find him, he smells of sea-salt and academic jitteriness, all windswept hair and sunlit eyes. Jester thinks he never looks more comfortable in his skin than right here, surrounded by ships and water and commotion after a whole day spent untangling the complexities of the ocean they both love so much.
There’s a Ferris wheel that’s set up by the pier every summer. Jester usually drags either Fjord or Beau to hop on a ride with her even though it’s touristy and overpriced. She loves feeling the air on her skin change as they ascend. As they round the top of the wheel she stares out at this city where she lives with all of her friends and she watches the sunset turn the sky grey-orange-indigo, and she grabs the hand of whoever’s next to her and yells at the top of her lungs, “Oh my god, I think this thing’s gonna fall! Save the babies!”
Or something along those lines. Whatever she thinks will embarrass Fjord or Beau more in the moment.
After that they go to a pub where Fjord and Beau drink lots of gross beer, and Jester sometimes drinks the sweetest, pinkest, least gross cocktail the place serves (but mostly just asks the server for chocolate milk and teasingly antagonizes them when they look at her like she’s unhinged), and they all eat a lot of fries and nachos and carbs that both Fjord and Beau will regret in the morning as they frantically plan their next gym session together to make up for it. For now, though, for now they’re buzzy and careless, their shoulders warm and steady sandwiching Jester on either side (the three of them cram into one side of the booth—it’s some kind of game of chicken, maybe, to see who complains first or who elbows whom in the face in a mad rush to squeeze past the others to run to the washroom).
The dull yellow lighting of the pub frames the sharp angles of Fjord’s face in this soft, cozy way that makes Jester feel like someone is tap-dancing in the very pit of her stomach. Beau aims an olive at Fjord’s mouth and it lands on his shoulder instead, and when he laughs, his arm brushing the back of Jester’s neck as he reaches across her to flick the olive into Beau’s hair, the warm amber of his eyes dances and flickers like the fireplace she remembers from her mother’s room. Bright, steadfast, and playful.
Jester sips her drink, and flings tortilla chips at them both like shuriken.
When it’s well past dark they wander out into the streets like the drunken, rowdy teenagers they never quite got to be, their loud voices the liveliest presence in all the open space. Fjord and Beau chase each other around, trying to trap each other in a noogie like they’re a pair of dumbass frat boys. Jester (sober, but onlookers would never be able to tell—hey, she just reflects the energy around her, okay?) cackles at them and films them on Snapchat, and pretends not to zoom in on Fjord’s deep-throated laughter when he trips and lands flat on his ass. Beau, for her part, dumps a handful of grass on his head in triumph.
A fierce fondness wells up in her chest. Booze might taste gross, but she kind of loves the way it lowers Fjord’s iron guard, lets Beau (the actual rowdy college kid) more easily goad him into acting like the stupid, playful asshole he tries so hard to pretend not to be.
Jester picks up a long twig and aims it downward at Fjord’s chest like a cutlass. He grins impishly up at her and drawls, “Lord help me. It’s Dread Pirate Jester Lavorre.”
She beams. (She doesn’t need booze to be a stupid, playful asshole.)
Sometimes when the night air is especially warm and Fjord and Beau are especially buzzed—while Jester just smirks and shoves at their shoulders when they rock into her, saying something like, “Ew, guys, you smell like sour piss”—they wander back to the port. They sit and watch the technicolor lights of the big Ferris wheel shimmer off of the black glass surface of the water, shoulders pressed against each other.
Jester always commits these scenes to memory so she can draw them in her book later. The slant of Fjord’s smile when he looks out at the water, the shade of Beau’s eyes against the gaudy colours of the Ferris wheel, the solid warmth of Fjord’s arm looping around Jester’s waist to steady her—which is less of a visual thing, maybe, but important for... for tonal reasons, or something. When she tries to recollect these snatches of time, though, they never translate to the page quite right, always falling through her fingers just as she tries to pull them closer to her chest, sketch them out the same way they stick in her mind.
It never occurs to her to take out her sketchbook right then and there, reproduce the moment as it’s happening. That would only distract Jester from actually living, after all, distract her from leaning her head into Fjord’s shoulder as he tries to coach Beau on texting her Tinder matches, distract her from tossing in her own inappropriately sexual suggestions that Beau usually ends up listening to instead of Fjord’s super boring advice. No, Jester wants to actually experience all of the memories she will try to save and put to paper, later, later. Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?
More often than not they stay out so late that Fjord misses the final bus back to his place, and Jester and Beau strong-arm him into sharing an Uber so he can just crash at their apartment. In the morning Jester wakes up with pages of her sketchbook stuck to her cheek, and when she steps out from her room into the common area she can see Fjord passed out on the couch (half of his body dangling over the edge, the fingers of one hand brushing the hardwood floor). He looks younger in his sleep, black hair messy and unstyled lying flat against his forehead, muscles slack enough to make the scars carved into his face look like nothing more than faded lines, relics of a distant past.
“Morning, Jes,” yawns a voice from behind her, making her jump. “You ogling our very own Sleeping Beauty again?”
Jester whirls around with a scoff. Beau moves way too soundlessly for someone as groggy and hungover as she must be at 9 in the morning.
“Speak for yourself,” Jester says with great dignity. “I would never, ever ogle, okay. I’m a woman of religion, you know.”
She keeps up the air of piousness while maintaining eye contact with Beau for a good six seconds before they both have to muffle a snort. The steady rhythm of Fjord’s breathing doesn’t falter.
As Beau waits for the water in the kettle to boil for coffee, she peeks over the back of the couch and makes a show of grimacing. “Ugh. Damn motherfucker doesn’t even drool. You think he’s faking? Like, maybe he’s actually awake and trying real hard to be supermodel hot?”
“Nope,” says Jester cheerfully. “He’s just that fucking perfect.”
She means to sound teasing, she really does, but it comes out almost shockingly sincere. Beau cocks a brow at her before ambling back toward the kitchen area.
“Gross,” she drawls, pulling out a box of Cheerios from the cabinet. “Do me a favour, Jes. When you two get married and have crazy adorable babies, name me godmother to a couple of those suckers, okay?”
Jester feels her ears burn hot, which is inexplicable. Jester Lavorre never blushes.
“What the fuck, Beau?” she complains, leaning against the back of the couch and very pointedly not glancing down at the still-sleeping Fjord. “Don’t be weird. He’s—you know, he’s my best friend.”
“Thought I was your best friend.”
“You both are.” Jester sticks her tongue out. “Anyway, don’t worry, bitch. When I have babies, you can be godmother to all of them, okay?”
Beau makes a face, her mouth crammed full of cereal. “Nah, that’s too much, dude. I can’t handle your whole damn brood if you and Fjord kick the bucket. They’d overpower me.”
“What the fuck? How many babies do you think we’ll have?” Then she flushes again. “And I mean we as in my future spouse and I, my future spouse who is not Fjord, my best friend—”
Beau just smirks. Chews her cereal. Fucker.
Jester summons a lecherous grin, changing tack. “Don’t worry, Beau,” she lilts with a sigh, “you don’t have to be jealous over a silly boy like Fjord. You know my heart will always belong to you, even if you do drool oceans in your sleep—”
Beau pelts Cheerios at her while Jester keeps flirting through her cackles, eventually laughing so hard she tips backwards over the couch and lands hard on Fjord’s torso, surely knocking the breath out of him. There’s a moment of silence as they wait for him to finally jolt awake.
Fjord lets out a deep, thunderous snore, forceful enough to blow her hair into her face, and Jester laughs and laughs until she falls to the floor.
III. AUTUMN
This is Jester’s first Thanksgiving with friends. It’s not a day any of them really celebrate, but well, a statutory holiday is a statutory holiday. Jester texts her mother every day and video calls her on the regular, but the idea of getting an entire long weekend to actually fly home and see her and hug her—that excites Jester even more than the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot or the sheepish grin on Fjord’s lips whenever he’s caught indulging his love for pumpkin spice everything.
This is Jester’s first Thanksgiving with friends, and when she asks them what their plans are, Fjord’s brow creases with confusion before he uncertainly says something about marking midterms, while Beau just makes a retching sound in her throat like she’s a cat with a hairball.
That’s how Jester ends up buying three round trip tickets to her hometown.
It’s a short flight, only about two hours, but Fjord brings one of those dorky U-shaped travel pillows onto the plane anyway, wearing it around his neck like a scarf. Beau barks a laugh and teases, “You look like a nerd,” while Jester only winks at him and says, “Don’t worry, I think it’s cute. You’re a cute nerd.”
Fjord just smiles lazily back at them, unperturbed.
When they’re up in the air, Fjord tilts his head at her with this weird, inscrutable look in his eye. “You excited about getting home?”
“I’m super fucking excited to see my mama,” Jester says, kind of answering a different question. It’s strange because she never thought she’d say this a year ago, but even though she misses her old house and really misses her mother, more than she has the words for—she kind of thinks the city they just left is actually home, now. The city where she rents an apartment with Beau and invades cafes with Fjord and rides the Ferris wheel every summer. The city where she’s building a life.
It almost feels like a betrayal, to have this new home. But maybe—maybe it’s also a sign of growing up, or independence, or some shit?
“Something on your mind?” Fjord says gently.
She meets his eyes. “I dunno. I was just thinking—I’m pretty sure I’ve done more cool shit with you and Beau in the last year than I had in the whole, like, twenty years I lived in my hometown combined. Not that I didn’t do cool shit before you guys, but—huh.” Her gaze drifts out the window. Nothing but blinding white space. “Isn’t that fucking trippy?”
“A bit fucking trippy,” he agrees. “For what it’s worth, I think I feel similarly on my end. Maybe it’s the company.”
Jester turns back to him and he’s grinning, face twitching in that weird way that she knows means he’s trying to wink. She laughs and slugs him in the arm.
“Corny,” she accuses.
“You like corny.”
“Well,” says Jester, pretending to consider it. “I like you, so. I guess we’ll see.”
Fjord blinks at her, something about the slant of his smile shifting just a little. No witty quip falling from his lips like she expects. Her heartbeat stutters. Their banter has always been quick and effortless, peppered from the very start with this note of easy flirtation that made onlookers raise their brows. That’s just how they are. Lately, though, lately it’s been different, this weird break happening more and more often—a sudden drop in the middle of conversation, a shift, as if the air between them has thinned and become harder to breathe, and it stays like this until one of them says something new or looks away.
From Fjord’s other side, a loud, familiar snore. Fresh air rushes back into her lungs.
They both turn to look at Beau, cheek pressed against her own shoulder as she twitches in her sleep. Jester makes a little “aw,” sound, shaking her head. She knows Beau needs the nap, but wow, she is going to wake up with the worst cramp when the plane lands.
“And that,” Fjord murmurs, grabbing the neck pillow from his own shoulders, “is why I brought this thing.”
Jester watches him lean over Beau’s seat and tuck the pillow behind her head with slow, gentle care, and for the second time in the past few minutes, her heart stutters in her chest. It’s sort of nice, though, she thinks, a smile curling across her lips. She can get used to this feeling—like she’s standing at the top of a waterfall with nothing but warmth under her skin.
And then Jester is in her hometown and her old house and launching herself into her mother’s arms, love and lavender enveloping her in a squishy bubble of familiarity, and she remembers why she always thought that nothing bad in the world could ever happen so long as her mom kept hugging her just like this.
“My Jester,” says Marion, lips against her hair, “my little Sapphire. Oh, how I’ve missed you.”
She wants to say, don’t be silly, mama, you see me on Skype all the time, but instead her voice is watery and all that comes out is, “I missed you, too. I missed you so, so much,” and she doesn’t care that it makes her sound younger than she is, even if Beau and Fjord are watching, hovering awkwardly behind her. (Okay, maybe she does care—or she will care, and be anxious about how they might see her, what they may make of this scene, but that is later, later when she is alone in the dark and not pressing her face into her mother’s dress.)
When mother and daughter finally separate, Marion addresses Fjord and Beau by name and pulls each of them into separate hugs. When she releases them, they both look very much like they might be blushing, although it’s hard for Jester to tell because of their respective skin tones. But Fjord is clearing his throat and ducking his head and Beau is nervously rubbing the back of her neck, and Jester is pretty great at reading them by now.
“It is so good to finally see you in person,” Marion says. “My Jester has told me so much about you both.”
“All good things, I hope,” Fjord says, almost shyly. Marion has caught glimpses of and even had brief conversations with Beau during Skype video calls in their apartment, but Jester realizes this is the first time her mother is seeing Fjord outside of a few photos.
“Only the best,” Marion assures him with a warm smile. Her eyes linger on Fjord as she ushers them all deeper into the house, before sliding Jester this very knowing look that reminds her a little too much of Beau’s raised-brow smirks from a certain hungover summer morning.
The rest of the weekend is pretty much perfect. They eat a lot and trade stories and spend evenings drinking wine (which Jester has two sips of before pouring the rest into Beau’s cup) and going through the dusty old board games she used to play alone with her mother and sometimes her tutors. Beau handily beats them all at Scrabble, which Beau herself seems to regret instantly as she flushes and mutters something about “dumb luck” and “nerd games.” Fjord and Marion get into several surprisingly tense matches of chess throughout the weekend, and Jester also teaches her mom this weird variant of poker she learned at a house party Beau took them to once, which only inspires Fjord and Beau to regale Marion with utterly slanderous tales about Jester’s nonexistent gambling problem.
So, yeah. Pretty much perfect.
Marion refuses to have anyone sleeping on the couch despite the house being only a two-bedroom. The solution: an air mattress is set up on the floor of Jester’s room for Fjord, while Beau and Jester decide to share Jester’s queen-sized bed.
The thing about a queen bed, though, is that it’s really fucking big, big enough for three, even. The first night, Beau and Fjord both drink a little too much wine due to jitteriness and they all stay up too late talking in the dark like children at those sleepovers Jester used to fantasize about as a preteen. They all end up dozing off sprawled in a heap on one bed, and Jester wakes at some point too early in the morning with Fjord’s arm slung heavy across her stomach and his head tucked into her armpit. That’s probably what woke her up; his breath tickles her skin, and she has to muffle a giggle because somehow she knows if she’s loud and wakes him, he’ll mumble a groggy apology and move to the air mattress, and she won’t really have a good reason to ask him to stay.
She drifts back to sleep with her head pillowed on Beau’s leg, and Fjord doesn’t wake up until much later. He stays.
Over the entire weekend with Jester’s present enmeshing her past, there’s only really one weird moment. It ends up being the moment she thinks about the most, though, after they all head back to the city.
It happens the second night. Beau ducks out to do some sightseeing and hit up some bars alone because as much as Jester would like to show her friends the city she grew up in but barely knows, Marion isn’t really one to leave the house and Jester didn’t want to waste a second she got to spend with her. Fjord and Beau resolved to keep them company, but that evening Beau slips out after pressing a shy, hasty kiss to Jester’s forehead, and Jester understands that Beau can’t stay cooped up in the suburbs for long without a few shots of something much stronger than wine.
Meanwhile Fjord is using the shower and Jester is talking with her mother in the sitting room, and things are normal until Marion suddenly gets this soft look in her eyes. A lump rises in Jester’s throat before she even knows why.
“I cannot express how thankful I am that you are happy, Jester,” her mother whispers, squeezing her fingers. “I—I am so glad you get to see the world, and all it has to offer.”
“Of course I’m happy, mama,” she says, squeezing back. “I’m always happy. I was happy here too, you know, growing up with you.”
Something unbearably sad passes over Marion’s face. “Oh, my Sapphire. I dearly hope that’s true. I never wanted you to be so isolated.”
“I wasn’t, though.” Jester smiles. “I had you.”
Her mother hugs her, and they both breathe long shaky breaths, and the thing is, Jester doesn’t even know if she’s lying or not. Jester thinks she was happy here, with her mom and her paints and this house. With the staff who loved her and the people who taught her. She has so many good memories, but when she falls asleep to the sound of Fjord and Beau snoring, the whole bed warmed by their heartbeats, she can’t help but think how much better she likes her room this way, compared to the version from her childhood.
In fact, when she goes back there now to grab her shower bag, while Fjord is still in the bathroom and Beau is still out somewhere in the city, the empty spaces of the room make her very bones feel heavy. She remembers the loneliness here, but she never thought it was a big deal until she became intimate with the alternative.
In the hallway, she almost walks right into Fjord. He’s just exiting the bathroom, his hair damp and curly, a towel slung around his shoulders and dripping small dark spots of water on his white sleeveless shirt.
“Whoa,” he says, hands on her shoulders to steady her. His mouth quirks. “Makin’ a mad dash to the crapper, Jes?”
She looks up at him. She has the absurd urge to brush away the stray strands of hair on his forehead with her fingers, and a different, warring urge to fling her arms around his waist and yank him into a hug. Instead, Jester settles for taking a small step back so they’re not pressed chest to chest. She settles a hand on the crook of his elbow.
“We first met in autumn,” she blurts. She meets his eyes, notices the furrowed confusion there. “Do you remember that, Fjord?”
“Of course,” he says immediately. He’s smiling now. “I recall I was the one who almost knocked you over, that time.”
She remembers. She’d been dashing off from some lame-o security guy who was all, “Do you have a license to operate a for-profit business on campus, ma’am,” when someone yelled behind her, “Hey! Hey, wait up, will ya?”
And for some reason, Jester listened. She waited up, stopped in her tracks and whirled around so fast that Fjord, the one who was calling for her in the first place, almost ran smack into her. He’d stopped himself just in time but lost his balance along the way, and began to fall backwards with his arms windmilling like an actual cartoon character.
Without even thinking about it, Jester caught him around the waist and pulled him back upright.
It was the kind of moment that would have triggered swoony music and a gentle swirl of pink rose petals if they were in an anime. As it stood, Jester just grinned like a jackass while Fjord looked torn between embarrassed and impressed. He was clutching this little stack of dog-eared papers in his fists all tight and careful, like he was scared the wind would blow them away.
Mostly, though, mostly Jester remembers the fallen leaves swarming the entire ground around them in an ocean of brilliant red and gold. And she remembers how it all paled and fell away next to the amber of Fjord’s eyes, crinkled by his apologetic grin.
“I remember,” Fjord is saying, leaning back against the bathroom door, “I remember you were sketching portraits of people for cash, like they do at Central Park. Except you did them all funny, like, adding clown noses and wigs or just drawing a picture of Mark Hamill and saying, ‘this was you in another life.’”
“Oh, yeah.” Jester grins. “Honestly I was just kind of shit at drawing faces, but I practiced a lot with Mark Hamill.”
“When you started running from security you dropped some pages from your sketchbook, and I—” Fjord shrugs, rubbing self-consciously at his cheek, obscuring the thin scar sliced across his lip. “I liked your work. Thought it’d be a shame for you to lose any of it.”
“Most of the stuff you returned to me were just dick doodles,” she remembers. “I have a zillion of those.”
“Well.” He smiles, and she realizes belatedly that her hand is still on his elbow. “Even so, Jes. Even so.”
IV. WINTER
They don’t usually get much snow here, not like the part of the country where Beau grew up—Jester’s seen pictures, and she’d love to visit someday, but she’s not gonna say that, for now—but this year their entire city is dusted with white halfway through December.
“It’s a Christmas miracle,” Jester breathes, sticking her face against the glass window.
“Thought you didn’t celebrate Christmas,” her boss grumbles.
“I only celebrate April Fool’s Day,” she says very seriously. It’s a matter of religion. “But I’ve watched way too many holiday TV specials to not be brainwashed into wanting a white Christmas.”
That evening her boss leaves at 4 p.m. and gives Jester free license to close up early, to “enjoy the weather,” he says. Jester fist pumps as soon as he turns his back, and texts Beau, “guess which bitch gets off work early!!!!111!!1 THIS BITCH!111!!!! aaaAAAAAAAyyyy!!!”
She doesn’t text back, so Jester sends a couple more, “AAAaaAAAAYYY”s for good measure. She can be her own hype man.
Half an hour later, Jester’s cleaned the whole bakery and closed the till and did all her other grown-up responsibilities, which means it’s time to dash home and drag Beau out of her studying-induced stupor and force her to make snow angels with her in the empty parking lot outside their building until their whole skeletons are numb with cold.
Fueled by this action plan, she’s just finished locking the door, about to shove the keys into her pockets and cross the street when a voice says from behind her—
“Oh. Uh, are you guys closed, then?”
And there he is. Fjord is standing there on the sidewalk with his hands crammed into the pockets of a too-puffy parka, something bright pink and horridly misshapen sitting atop his head, just barely covering his ears from the harsh cold.
Jester blinks. “You’re wearing the toque I knit you last year,” she says.
“Huh?” He lifts a hand, touches the wool flattening his hair like he’d forgotten it was there. “Oh, yeah. Guess I am. It was a nice gift.”
“I mean, I know I got really into knitting for a while but you can admit I was super shit at it, y’know. You don’t have to, like, protect my feelings or something, Fjord.” She tilts her head. “I mean, I kind of just gave you it as a prank because Beau bet me five bucks that you’d actually wear it in public and we were gonna Snapchat it.”
Fjord shrugs, tugging on the toque so it’s wrapped around his ears even more snugly. It ends up all crooked, drooping over his brow and probably obscuring his field of vision. It’s a terrible hat.
“Well, even if it’s a prank,” he says, “I’m gonna keep wearin’ it. I like it.”
“You’re sweet.” Jester grins, skipping forward and standing on her tiptoes so she can adjust the toque as best as she can, trying to straighten it so Fjord can at least see. She’s too short, though, and Fjord doesn’t lean down any to help, so she just ends up yanking the wool till it covers his eyes completely.
“Wow,” he says.
“Hang on,” she complains, still grabbing at his face, “I’m trying to fix it, okay.”
“No, no,” he says, laughing. He traps her hands in his and slowly lowers them. “In fact, I like it this way. It’s called style.”
There’s a single second of stillness where their fingers are still tangled together before he lets go. It reminds her inexplicably of the Weird Moment at her mom’s house during Thanksgiving, and she resists the strange, timid impulse to take a step back.
“How can you like it better this way,” she says, pretending to be offended. “Are you saying you don’t want to look at my super hot face, Fjord? That’s really rude.”
“The opposite, ma’am,” he returns. “I need this barrier for fear of being blinded by your stunning beauty, of course.”
“...Motherfucker.” She shoves him, then grabs the sleeves of his coat in case he actually stumbles backward into the street. All too aware of the busy traffic, Jester tugs him in closer to the storefront.
“My devil and my angel,” he drawls.
Jester snorts, leaning back to squint up at his face still half-covered by the hat. “Are you super stoned right now? You don’t smell like it.” She hums. “Did you try some of Beau’s weird gummy worms—because lemme tell you, those are not what you think they are—”
“I’m not stoned.” Fjord clears his throat. “Or drunk. Think I’m just—cold. And nervous, I guess.”
“Why?” Then she realizes how sidetracked she’s gotten, chasing the thread of the lumpy pink hat monster. “Oh, wait. Did you say you wanted a cake or something? If you really, really need one, I can just bake one for you at home, you know.”
“Okay. That’s good.” He exhales. His breath comes out as a puff of white mist. “’Cause the thing is, I kinda wanted a custom order.”
“I can do that,” Jester says, nodding. “Is it someone’s birthday coming up? Are you throwing a party?”
“Not exactly.”
Fjord pauses after that, and Jester gazes up at him, really, really wishing she could make eye contact. But he’s too damn tall for her to pull away that ugly hat, and okay, a big part of her has to admit it’s also really funny to see him standing there so nervous with a pink woolly lump eating the upper half of his face. It’s so funny, it kind of almost makes up for Jester missing out on getting to see how pretty his eyes look with flecks of snow swirling around them.
“Fjord?” she prompts. “What the heck did you want the cake for?”
The wind picks up before he can answer, sending a flurry of white and frost right into their faces. Fjord shivers a bit, even underneath his huge-ass parka. Jester, though, Jester barely feels the cold, isn’t even wearing gloves.
Neither is he, though, and maybe that’s the problem. She grabs his hands, rough and familiar, and while in any other circumstance his fingers would be much, much warmer than hers—here she is in her element, and she feels him relax and settle into the heat of her palms.
“Thanks, Jester.” A snowflake sticks, melts on his cheek.
“Always,” she says.
They stand there like that in front of her bakery in the centre of whirling snow, his hands held between hers and Fjord still blindfolded by pink wool, and all of a sudden Jester doesn’t really care what cake Fjord wants. She doesn’t care why he’s here. More than anything, she’s just glad he is. This stupid, smart, wonderful boy who waits for her in overpriced cafes and comes alive surrounded by saltwater, who rough-houses with his friends like an idiot frat guy just as much as he offers them dorky neck pillows and steady advice. She’s glad he came here on the first snowfall of the year wearing a pink monstrosity made by Jester’s own hand. She’s really, really glad.
Just as she thinks this, though, Fjord at last speaks up.
“You know,” he says, “you know, there’s this girl I really like. I like her so much I almost kissed her at her mom’s house on Thanksgiving. I almost kissed her a hundred times, actually. But I still haven’t.”
“She sounds like a dumbass,” says Jester. “Because I mean, she hasn’t kissed you yet either.”
“Yeah.” Fjord nods. “Yep, she’s a fuckin’ dumbass. She only fucking eats pastries and she doesn’t really like baking even though she works at a bakery. She likes making art with the icing and she likes drawing nonsense pictures on a campus of a school she doesn’t attend and selling them for $20 a pop. God.” He sucks in an unsteady breath. “I like her. I like her so much, Jester. So I guess—I wanted you to make me a cake that could tell her that, maybe. Custom order.”
She’s squeezing his hands so tight now that they must hurt, she knows how strong she is, but he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move away. His skin feels warmer now, at least. It’s hard to tell where her body temperature ends and his begins.
“I can’t believe you told me that whole thing with that stupid fucking hat covering your eyes,” she says.
“Made it a lot easier on me,” he admits. “My tongue gets stupid when I look at you too long.”
“Oh my gosh,” she laughs, and it’s not exactly like the romance novel one-liners she used to practice in her diary, but well, maybe her tongue gets a little stupid around him, too. “Fuck off.”
And then he’s leaning down and she’s letting go of his hands to rip off that toque just in time, just in time—because she catches a flash of amber, her new favourite colour so goddamn bright even in the wintry dusk, right before his mouth is on hers, cool and soft and slightly chapped. His nose grazes her cheek and she has to pull back for a moment to shiver and say, “Holy crap, Fjord, your skin is covered in ice or something,” and he laughs and opens his mouth to retort before she’s tugging him back down, and she thinks, wow, his whole damn face must be numb by now, cold and smooth beneath her fingers.
But Jester figures she has more than enough time to help him warm it up. After all, the two of them, they look out for each other. It’s what they do.
V. LATER
(The curtains are drawn so everything is dark. The world starts and ends at the edges of this one room and in this context that’s not at all a bad thing.
His head rests in her lap and she can finally, finally comb her fingers through the feathery dark locks of his hair, pulling them away from his eyes.
“You look pretty,” she tells him, even in the dim light.
“Thank you,” he says. There’s a twitching of his lips, an admission stuck between his teeth. “Y’know, I was fucking terrified your mother wouldn’t like me.”
“She loved you before she even saw you.”
“I know,” he says quietly. “That was part of the problem, really. All my life people have judged me because of how I look, and—well, I figure it’s something in my control. I try to look my best, and behave my best, and it’s...”
“You don’t have to,” she says. She taps a finger on his eyelid. “I don’t give a shit, you know. I think I’d like every version of you.”
“I did puke beer on your shoes once.”
“Yeah. And you’ve totally smelled my poop. We’re bonded for life.”
“I can live with that.” He reaches up, traces the line of her jaw with one finger until he finds a lock of hair that he tucks behind her ear. “That goes for you, too, y’know. I think I’d like every version of you. You can be sad or happy or lonely. I’m here forever.”
“Okay,” she says. She’s starting to get that. “We’re fucking stuck with each other. Like the earth’s stuck spinning around and around the sun with the same four seasons over and over until climate change fucks shit up and makes everything explode.”
“Until everything explodes,” he agrees.)