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The first rays of golden sunlight catch on Clary’s elbows. They reach their arms out until all the miles of naked alabaster skin are glowing a soft rosé. The sheets are wrapped around her carelessly, barely covering what last night revealed. Curls of red hair still stick damp to the ugly patterned pillowcase as she snores gently just under her breath. It’s the prettiest sight Maia has seen in months. Maybe ever.
“I know you,” the girl drenched from the rain had choked out when Maia had opened the door to her last night after an insistent round of banging on the thin wood she was afraid would wake up the neighbors. “I know you, right?”
She had stormed into her apartment just as she had stormed back into her life a few weeks earlier, ignorant to the racing of Maia’s heart. A swirl of red hair and raindrops. Her gaze had been frantic, a deer caught in headlights and chased down streets. Within its depths, Maia had hoped to see the spark of something, a memory of before. It hadn’t been there.
“How do I know you?” Clary had breathed out, dripping rain onto the floorboards.
“Let me get you a towel.”
And that’s all it had been, a towel and tea until it had been more. Until Clary had clung to her with the desperation of a year spent apart and gasped out her name with lips gracing across Maia’s collarbone. For a bittersweet hour or two before hadn’t mattered when new memories could be made.
Later Clary had settled into Maia’s arms as if this was the place meant for her. Had tucked her head under Maia’s chin and fallen asleep with a smile on red-kissed lips to the sound of her heartbeat.
Outside a car honks repeatedly. The alarm shows 5:37am in bold green letters. Clary Fray sleeps as if the angels themselves hadn’t ripped her from life a year ago; as if she simply doesn’t care. Maia can just see the crease between her brows deepening, a heartfelt “Fuck the angels,” sent up to the sky if she ever told her the truth. It wrings an unexpected chuckle from her chest.
The sound or the light causes a stir through Clary’s body then. When she wakes up things will be different. Tense probably. Awkward most definitely. There are conversations to be had and calls to be made and caution to be taken. Maia’s head throbs and her heart aches at the mere thought of it.
Gentle searching fingers find hers beneath the sheets and suddenly none of it matters.
In a rush of gratefulness or affection or sentimentality or all of the above Maia leans down to press a kiss to Clary’s closed eyelid.
Stay asleep, stay dreaming. Reality can’t touch you here.
Beneath her, pressed into the mattress by her body, Clary shivers, then stretches delightfully, exaggeratedly. So Maia kisses her other eyelid just to prolong the moment, to see if she can elicit the same reaction again. And again. When she tries to lean away this time, hands frame her face and then green eyes open to stare up at her, sparkling despite the early hour.
There’s no regret, only the almost reverent touch of fingertips across Maia’s jaw, down her neck and back, beneath the sheet wrapped around them both.
“Hey,” Clary breathes with a smile.
“Hey.”
Something warm and wet stings at Maia’s eyes. Clary leans up to kiss it away.