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Beau didn’t even see the jackass coming.
One moment she was pedaling furiously down her usual route home from work, leaning to the left to make a turn she’d done a thousand times. The next—
Bone-shattering impact.
The last thought to drift into her mind before she lost consciousness, ambulance lights flashing in her face, was that Jester was gonna give the city so much shit for not building designated bike lanes, after this.
#
She woke up to white ceilings, incessant beeping, and the sharp smell of antiseptic hitting her like a wall. In other words, she woke up in the hospital.
It was kind of alarming how deeply familiar Beau was with this place, at the tender age of twenty-four. She had to admit getting hit by a goddamn car was a new experience, though.
She also felt more shit than she ever had, physically speaking. She was no doctor, but even she could tell this wasn’t like those times she got alcohol poisoning in college, or ended up on the losing side of a fistfight with a too-brutal stranger. Lying on that road there, waiting in a painful haze for the paramedics to arrive, Beauregard had been gripped by the coldest, clearest certainty she was going to die.
And that—that was definitely a first.
“Motherfucker,” she mumbled to herself, blinking at the ceiling. She struggled to sit up.
“Ah,” said a soft voice that made Beau’s heart stop beating in her chest, “the doctor said you probably shouldn’t be moving anytime soon.”
And there, sitting in a hard metal chair at Beau’s bedside was the last person she ever expected to see.
Beau stared. All intimidating, inscrutable five feet eleven inches of Yasha Nydoorin stared back.
#
The memory of a typical moment, almost a year ago, now seared into her brain like a brand.
Beau had woken to the low rumble of thunder. It was still the middle of the night, her whole bedroom pitch black, but a split second of lightning illuminated Yasha’s familiar form at the edge of the bed, buttoning up a rumpled shirt.
Beau reached out blindly in the dark.
“It’s raining,” she said, voice still rough with the edges of sleep.
“Yes,” Yasha agreed quietly, giving no indication she was surprised Beau was awake. It was more than just raining outside; the wind howled, thunder growled, raindrops pelted the window-glass like bullets.
Another flash of lightning. Yasha was standing now.
“You’ll get drenched,” Beau tried again.
“It’s fine,” said Yasha. Heavy footsteps.
Stay, Beau didn’t say. For once, just stay.
A clumsy, hesitant kiss landed on her brow. Yasha’s mouth was wispy soft, gentle, in shattering contrast to the hard, rough sex they’d shared just hours earlier. Beau didn’t move. Didn’t trust her voice. Footsteps again, the dull creak of her bedroom door opening and closing. Then Yasha was gone.
Beau rolled over and pulled the duvet up to her ears.
In the morning, she woke up alone. The sky was clear.
#
There were many such nights in the not-relationship Beau and Yasha had shared. That’d kind of been their whole deal, after all: sex to let off steam, no strings, no commitments. It was a fragile balance, especially when they shared so many mutual friends, when so much of their free time was spent together, crammed into each other’s space until sometimes it was too easy to forget they were never supposed to be officially dating.
Beau had felt like she was always holding her breath, wondering when she would slip up, when Yasha would be scared off for good. After one of those routine hookups in Beau’s apartment, Yasha vanishing with the storm, never staying the night—it finally happened. Time crawled by, the sky stayed clear and cold, and Yasha didn’t come back.
#
The harsh hospital lighting clung to the sharp lines of Yasha’s face, made her eyeliner darker, her skin paler than it already was, which was really, really saying something.
Beau didn’t try to sit up again. “What are you doing here?” she croaked. She had meant it to come out louder, angrier, but her throat was uncooperatively dry and scratchy.
Yasha diverted her gaze, ever unreadable. “I should get the doctor. He said to call him as soon as you woke up.”
“Yasha,” she said, and gods, how long had it been since she’d let her lips form her name? “Yasha, what the fuck are you doing here?”
This time Yasha looked her in the eye.
“The hospital staff called me,” she said, quiet and steady. “Apparently I’m listed as the emergency contact on your cell phone.”
Still, Yasha didn’t say, but Beau could feel the words in her silence. Still, after everything, after we haven’t spoken in months and months and months.
Well, fuck.
“I must have forgotten to change it,” Beau said. A lie.
“That’s fine,” Yasha said stiffly.
Also a lie. It probably wasn’t fine. There were no accidents in the jagged wreck that was their relationship, no casual whims. Getting Yasha listed as an emergency contact at all was, like everything else in their time together, a slow, deliberate step forward, a fucking capital-M Moment crackling with significance. At the time, it had felt like everything.
It’d been a great night out with all of their friends—one of those full, perfect nights that had Beau laughing so hard she was almost crying, leaning into Yasha’s side for support, and Yasha let her, steadied her, even as Jester winked and everyone else traded knowing smirks. At the end of it all, the two of them took a cab back to Beau’s place, drunk and horny and giddy.
They were kissing before Beau even unlocked her front door, Yasha’s breath hot on her skin, a hint of teeth as she nipped at her neck, her shoulder, claiming every inch of her she could reach. Beau stumbled, fumbled, one arm wrapped around Yasha’s waist and the other trying to fish the key fob out of her pocket.
But once Beau finally got the door open and they tripped together into her apartment, something shifted.
Yasha’s touch turned tender, even careful, one hand cupping Beau’s face as she leaned down to ghost her lips over Beau’s own. The usual heat was gone, replaced by a low, easy warmth. When Yasha pulled back and Beau stared up into her eyes, there was something gentle, unbearably gentle in the way she looked at her.
Her palm stayed warm on Beau’s cheek, her thumb stroking a yellowed, healing bruise under her left eye. “Where did this come from?” she murmured.
“Bar fight. Or maybe a sparring accident?” she said absently, much more interested in twining her fingers with Yasha’s, pressing a soft fumbly kiss to her wrist.
“It’s always something,” said Yasha, mouth twitching into a frown or a smile; it was hard to tell, especially in the dim yellow light of the entryway. “You’re always hurt, somehow. Have you noticed?”
“C’mon, Yash.” She smiled crookedly. “Admit it. I’m kinda hot when I’m all beat and battered up for you. Rocking that wear and tear, yeah?”
“You should take your wellbeing more seriously,” Yasha said, and then kissed her before she could reply. She smelled and tasted like Yasha always did on their nights together, like rain and flowers, and the faint bite of vodka.
Yasha reached around and pulled Beau’s phone out of her butt pocket, turning it toward Beau for her to unlock.
“You don’t have an emergency contact,” she said, creasing her brow at the screen.
Beau blinked, a little too drunk to process the bizarre turn their usual hookup had taken. “I guess not? I didn’t even know that was a feature on this thing, honestly.”
“What will happen if you get hurt?”
“I dunno. I’ll get to the hospital and, like, call Jester or Fjord or somebody myself, I guess?”
Yasha frowned—Beau could see it clearly now, with the light of the phone screen illuminating her face. She typed something brisk and purposeful. Returned the phone to Beau.
Beau stared at the screen, and then looked back up at Yasha, those gentle eyes.
“Really?” Beau hated how uncertain she sounded, how her voice always cracked like a moon-eyed teenager’s in moments like this.
“If you’re ever in trouble,” Yasha murmured, “or ever in pain, I want to know. I want to be there.”
She sounded so certain in that soft, booze-soaked moment. Everything had felt so certain, so safe as Yasha leaned forward, pressing Beauregard firmly to the wall, her thumb tracing the contours of her face, again and again and again. Beau could have died right then, drowned in this woman, and she knew it would have been nothing but divine.
#
“You’re remarkably lucky,” said the doctor as he finished looking Beau over. He flipped through her charts, brows arched. “Not many people can expect to just walk away from an accident like this.”
“It’s whatever,” she muttered, lying through her teeth. “I’ve walked away from worse.”
She felt more than saw Yasha rolling her eyes from her seat beside the bed.
“If that’s true,” the doctor said, “then I’m very concerned about the sort of life you might be leading, Ms. Lionett.”
“No need for formalities,” she said with a grimace, at the same time as Yasha cut in, “She prefers ‘Beauregard.’”
Beau stared. Yasha went pink, catching herself.
“Well,” she said steadily, “you do.”
“Actually, just ‘Beau’ is even better,” she told the doctor, her voice colder than she intended. Yasha looked away.
“In that case,” he said, pointedly ignoring the knotty ball of tension tangled between them, “you may call me Horiss.”
“Okay, Horiss,” said Yasha, sounding very tired.
Horiss fussed over Beau for a while longer, summarizing her injuries, discussing medication options, and lecturing her in particular about the concussion she’d sustained—the third one in her life. At some point a cop came in and asked for her statement to include in the accident report. She tried her best to be cooperative considering she was more or less the victim in this case, but still, the officer’s presence made her twitchy and irritable and she was thankful when Horiss returned to shoo him away.
Through it all, Yasha stayed. Sitting by her bedside arms folded, face blank, watching her—at least, watching her whenever she thought Beau wasn’t looking. When Beau did look, Yasha was always careful to avoid her gaze and instead stare fixedly at the wall behind her bed, not saying a damn word.
Beau wanted to call her out on it. But her brain was fuzzy and her words kept getting lost on their way out of her mouth. Maybe she didn’t know what to say. Maybe she and Yasha had that in common, after all.
Maybe concussions were just really fucking inconvenient.
“So, hey,” she said, flagging Horiss down before he could vanish again, “who do I talk to so I can bust out of here?”
His brow creased. “You want to leave?”
“No shit. Am I not allowed?”
“Well...” Horiss frowned. “Strictly speaking, no, I suppose you don’t have to stay. But considering the severity of the accident, I’d feel more comfortable keeping you here for the night at the very least.”
“Dope. What I’m hearing is: I can go.”
The doctor shot Yasha an exasperated look. “Do you agree with this, or would you like to talk some sense into your partner here?”
“Yasha’s not—” A hard lump rose in her throat. Mortifying.
“There’s no use,” Yasha said, ignoring her. “She’s always like this.”
Beau didn’t trust herself to respond, anger hot and sudden threatening to choke her. What the fuck? What was Yasha playing at? Speaking with such easy familiarity? It’d been a year. A year.
She still didn’t look at her.
Shit. Beau needed a big bottle of rum and something to punch. Remedies she wasn’t sure were available to her, considering the whole ‘freshly concussed’ thing. Shit. Fuck. Shit.
“As long as you take her home,” Horiss said, “and stay with her and makes sure she listens to everything I’ve outlined, I can’t stop Beau from getting discharged if that’s what she wants. Like I said, it’s a miracle she’s in as good a shape as she is, considering how much worse this could’ve went.”
It took her a few moments to realize Horiss was still talking to Yasha.
“No,” she cut in, “no, fuck, I mean—” She shot Yasha a look. “I wouldn’t wanna, uh, inconvenience you. I can call a cab. I’ll be fine.”
“You would not be inconveniencing me,” she said. Stiff as an anvil. Liar. “But I understand if—well. I understand.”
Yasha finally met her eyes. There was something soft in them that Beau didn’t expect, something she refused to name.
“Let me drive you to your place, at least,” she continued, still stiff, “and then you can call someone else to look after you for the night. You shouldn’t be alone.”
“I do better alone. You should know.”
Yasha winced. The doctor glared.
“But... fine.” Beau dropped her gaze. Absurdly guilty. “Fine. Just... take me home, Yash.”
Yasha stood. The harsh scream of her chair scraping across the floor sent Beau’s head pounding even more than it already was. She stared into her lap, and wished her stupid hands would quit shaking.
“Okay,” Yasha said softly. “Whatever you need.”
#
When it had finally become apparent Yasha was gone for good, all of their friends began treating Beau like she was made of glass, like one wrong word would shatter her to ugly unfixable pieces. Luckily, most of them had snapped out of it after a couple weeks or so, probably because they could tell she was going to punch someone’s lights out if they kept talking to her like she was a child whose dog had died.
The only person to skip the kid gloves entirely, the person to poke shamelessly at Beau no matter how pathetic and wrecked she was starting to seem—
“You look like absolute shit,” Mollymauk Tealeaf would tell her often and with great cheer. He’d sweep into her apartment to mooch off her Netflix, bearing nothing but mediocre Korean food and a mostly-empty bottle of Baileys. A crappy deal for her, considering all he would stream was bad anime and weird foreign reality TV.
“Suck an egg,” she’d snap at him, grabbing the Baileys from his hand and chugging it in one go.
He was right, though. She did look like shit, in the month following The Not-Breakup. Was it a breakup if you were never really dating? Was it a breakup if the other chick didn’t so much break up with you, as she did vanish without a word, ignore all your texts and the one phone call you mustered the courage to make, and let you find out via a mutual friend she probably wouldn’t ever be coming back into town for the foreseeable future?
See, these were the types of queries she wasn’t keen on posting to Yahoo Answers. Mollymauk told her the responses would probably be hilarious, though.
Surprisingly, he was showing up at her apartment more often since The Not-Breakup. He was annoying and obnoxious as ever, and in some ways it was comforting: he was the polar opposite of Yasha by every metric. Yasha would never do something like go through Beau’s laptop without permission and then complain loudly about the narrow offerings of her porn folder while Beau was microwaving popcorn.
On the other hand, he was Mollymauk, which meant when he was around, she was reminded of Yasha at every turn, huge and unavoidable. Their souls were interwoven—of course it was impossible to see him without thinking of her. She was the one who’d bought him his favourite, hideous pair of blasphemously tight leather pants. They even shared the same flowery perfume. Every time Beau breathed, she remembered soft pale hands and the quiet burn of her mouth.
“Why are you still friends with me?” Beau asked glumly one night in the middle of a Naruto episode. She’d drunk her way through her remaining supply of vodka, a bottle she’d only kept around for Yasha’s sake.
“Oh, have we reached the ‘asking stupid questions’ segment of the night now?” said Molly.
“Fuck you.” She buried her face in a couch cushion. “S’not a stupid question. You’re her best friend. You barely even like me.”
“If you truly think I don’t like you,” he said, gentle and snide and soft all at once, “then you really are depressed to the point of self-delusion. That, and far, far too drunk—and, mind you, I’m acutely aware of the hypocrisy of this statement.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.” She sniffed. “Stop. It’s weird.”
“As you wish, my unpleasant friend.”
“Fuck you,” she repeated, but felt less like she was about to cry, which was a plus.
Beau almost drifted off in wake of the ensuing quiet, the corny English anime dub familiar enough to be soothing. White noise. Yasha had liked white noise, confessing it helped lessen her nightmares. After that, Beau had spent an entire afternoon researching YouTube channels, Spotify playlists, white noise machines she could order online...
“I am horrifyingly, legitimately fond of you, you know,” Molly said, his voice distant and garbled like she was already asleep. “But you’re right. If Yasha wanted me to cut ties with you, with all of you, I would. If she asked, I’d ditch this place and travel wherever she wanted. And I made sure she knew that.” He sighed. “Luckily for you, she wants no such thing. She would never.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. Thanks for telling me.”
“Here to help.”
It did help, bizarrely enough. She knew he was being honest. And she remembered Caleb making a similar offer to her. He was still friends with Yasha but privately assured Beau he would stop if she needed or wanted him to. As hurt and pissed as she was, she’d been startled by Caleb’s words. She was queasy at the idea of any of Yasha’s few friends abandoning her for Beau’s sake. Just because Beau had been a stupid fucking asshole who broke the rules and caught feelings for her fuck-buddy.
Yasha didn’t deserve to be alone.
“You’re too hard on yourself,” Molly said, so quietly she didn’t know if she was dreaming it. “You have that in common with her, you know.”
In the morning, Beau woke to the cacophony of Mollymauk’s demonic snoring. He was passed out on the couch beside her, exactly where she’d left him.
“You stayed,” she muttered later, dizzy and hungover.
“Yes,” he said. “Shocking, isn’t it?”
#
The ride home was uncomfortable.
“Your address hasn’t changed?” asked Yasha.
“No.” Beau raised a brow. “You still remember it?”
Yasha didn’t reply. Just wordlessly began driving.
Beau tried to look anywhere but at her face. Yasha’s truck was exactly like she remembered it. Old and beat-up as all hell, but clean. Quiet as anything and surprisingly reliable. Yasha had done a lot of work on it. Beau even remembered helping out, once or twice. Lied about being good at that stuff, and spent a weekend lurking through every Internet car forum she could find.
She knew Yasha saw right through her. But, well, she was still a bigger help than Molly.
Molly. Her brain snagged on his name, a stupid scrap of common ground. A safe, non-incendiary conversation topic.
“You know,” she said, gazing determinedly out the window, “I almost skipped his birthday party last month. ’Cause I was scared you’d be there.”
So much for non-incendiary.
“I was sorry to have missed it,” Yasha said. Calm. “It sounded like a good time.”
“Yeah, well. It was. It’s Molly, right? And Jes. They’re always...”
She trailed off. Her tongue felt like a dead hunk of flesh just taking up space in her mouth: a choking hazard, more than anything.
“Yes,” said Yasha.
Another long stretch of silence, frustration and loss burning through her insides. Not mingling well with her injuries.
“Did you—” Yasha’s voice was so faint, it was almost drowned out by the low thrum of the engine. “Would it really have been so awful to see me?”
“I don’t know, Yash.” She sighed. “You tell me. You were the one too scared to show up, right?”
Yasha stiffened. “I was occupied.”
“Right. Fine.”
“Not everything I do is about you, Beauregard.”
“What about skipping town? Leaving m—leaving everyone.” Beau swallowed. “But still talking to all our friends, just not me. Not me.”
She closed her eyes, as if that’d stop her hands and voice from trembling. God. She was so tired.
“Yeah,” said Yasha. “Yeah, that one was about you.”
“Oh, good,” she said weakly. “Thought I was developing an ego problem.”
“I wouldn’t rule that out, still, knowing you.”
A beat.
Then a laugh tumbled out of Beau, startling them both.
“Sorry.” Yasha coughed, uncomfortable. “Not the best time for that kind of joke, maybe.”
“Oh, no, go ahead,” said Beau, cracking a smile. “Roast the car crash victim. The emotional damages will distract from the concussion and bruised ribs.”
“Good,” said Yasha. “I knew my bedside manner would work on somebody.”
Beau peeked sideways at her. She was smiling now, too.
Something warm and frail unspooled in her ribs. She’d forgotten this: how addictive it was to be the one unlocking Yasha’s smile. It was like a puzzle, a Rubik’s cube. A very, very pretty Rubik’s cube, tiny and crooked.
Beau shook her head. “No,” she said.
“What?”
“To answer your question. No, it wouldn’t have been awful to see you, Yasha.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t smiling anymore.
“I mean,” Beau swallowed, “is it so awful to see me right now?”
She was trying to provoke, to land on caustic and careless. Instead the words came out wobbly. Vulnerable.
At that moment the truck came to a stop in the parking garage of Beau’s building. Yasha cut the engine, leaving thick silence to settle over them in the dark.
“No,” Yasha said eventually. She got out of the car, door slamming shut behind her.
Beau flinched. But before she could start chewing herself out for saying something stupid again, Yasha re-appeared on the passenger side. She pulled open the door and reached out a hand, stopped just short of touching Beau’s elbow.
“No,” she repeated. Her face was soft. “No, it is not so awful to see you.”
“Oh.” Beau blew out a slow breath. “Okay. Well, uh, it’s not awful for me, either. Seeing you. Right now.”
“I think we’ve clarified that.”
“Hey, leave me alone.” Beau cocked a small grin. “I’m concussed.”
Yasha didn’t return the smile like she expected. A bleak, almost angry cloud passed over her features, but before Beau could decipher the emotion brewing in her eyes, it was gone.
“Yes,” said Yasha, carefully blank. “I’m aware.”
After another long, frozen moment, Yasha closed the distance between them, hand settling over Beau’s arm. A gentle squeeze, barely there.
“Let me help you inside,” she said.
Beau let her.
#
“It wasn’t all my fault.”
“I know,” said Yasha softly, pressing the toweled bundle of ice to her bruised ribs. She drew away too quickly, forcing Beau to grab hold of the ice herself before it fell against the bed. “I listened to the report. The driver was reckless, not you.”
“I’m not—” Beau winced, tried to sit up straighter against the stack of pillows Yasha had constructed for her. “I’m not talking about the accident.”
Yasha stilled.
Beau forged on anyway.
“Sure, Yash, maybe I—I broke the basic rules of engagement, or whatever. But y’know what? You didn’t stop me.”
Yasha sprang to her feet as if Beau had struck her. She scrubbed a frustrated hand down her face, expression hidden by the shadowy darkness of Beau’s bedroom.
“This isn’t the time to talk about this,” she said. “You’re hurt.”
“Yeah, I’m hurt. That’s the only reason you’re here, so—” Beau clenched her teeth, glared up at her in defiance. But also pleading, just a little. “—so this is the only time to talk about this. You could be gone in the morning.”
Silence. Then—
“Yes. I could.”
Beau’s mouth quirked sideways. “Thanks for not lying.”
“I never lied, is the thing.” Now Yasha sounded—not angry, exactly. But perched on the brink of it. “I thought we were clear, from the very beginning, that what we shared—we never—”
She huffed, sitting heavily on the edge of the mattress, her back to Beau but careful not to jostle her. Always so careful.
Beau shifted her palm, ice cubes perspiring on her skin and the towel growing lukewarm from her body heat. She gave Yasha time to find her words. And oh, she did find them:
“I was never going to stay.”
“So you never did,” Beau agreed, weakly. “I know it’s not fair to blame you for that.”
“But you do.” It wasn’t a question.
“That’s not—listen, I never blamed you for leaving. That was never it.”
Yasha shot her a look. Skeptical.
“Okay, fine,” Beau said. “Maybe I did, a little bit, because that shit hurt. But you could’ve—you could’ve talked to me, Yash.” Here her voice broke, but she couldn’t even bring herself to care. She’d just been hit by a car: the rest of her was already broken. “You could’ve told me what was wrong, or called me up and ended things with me. Anything but just vanish, the way you did.”
“I know.”
“You were my friend.”
“And you were mine,” Yasha said softly.
Beau stared at her, heart in her throat. Half-melted ice burning the skin of her abdomen, water dripping on her mattress. Her ribs hurt. Her head hurt. Yasha still wasn’t facing her, her expression half-shrouded in shadow, but here she was, close enough to touch. Here they were.
“I want that,” Beau said, her voice like broken glass lodged in sand. “I want us to be friends again.”
“Let me get you more ice,” said Yasha.
Beau’s head fell back against the pillow, breath shuddering out of her. Hit by a goddamn car, and still none of her throbbing, bleeding injuries hurt as much as Yasha’s words, her flat familiar dismissal.
But she peeled her eyes open and Yasha was standing in the doorway, very, very still. Ice melting in her hands.
“Sorry,” she said, in her soft way. “What I mean is… I want that, too. For us to be friends.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I want that very much, Beau. I just—I just don’t know how, with you.”
The silence stretching between them then was choking and terrible, and that was always it, wasn’t it? Nothing about the two of them had ever been easy, not for a second. There was no instant, natural connection, no unspoken understanding, and certainly no spoken understanding because they were both so goddamn bad with words. They were never on the same page; they did not fall together like puzzle pieces, uneven edges made to click into place. Their edges chafed, scraped. Bled.
Yasha stepped forward. She sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and pressed cold, damp fingers to the skin of Beau’s wrist. Like she was feeling for a pulse, measuring her breaths to the beat of Beau’s heart.
“It’s funny,” Yasha said at last. “You really are nothing like her, you know. I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.”
And. Well. Beau was used to being a disappointment. She didn’t flinch. The grief twisting Yasha’s face cut deeper than any reminder that Beau could never be enough.
I don’t need to be enough, she thought desperately. I just want to see you smile again.
She placed a hand on top of Yasha’s still resting on her wrist. Unable, as always, to find the right words, all the wrong ones sticking in her teeth.
“When we were together,” Yasha continued, haltingly, “I would wake up at night and see you asleep next to me, and be so terrified I would lose you. I didn’t think I could suffer that again and survive. But in the end I lost you anyway, didn’t I?” She smiled, brittle and bent. “At least this way I could tell myself it was my choice, and that you were better off.”
“And here I thought it was my snoring that made you leave.”
It was a weak joke, but Yasha laughed anyway.
“The snoring was another very real factor,” she said, eyes sparkling even in the dark. Then she shook her head. “No, not really, though. I don’t—I don’t know. The accident today wasn’t your fault, I know that, but back then—you treat yourself so carelessly sometimes, Beauregard. I can’t—”
“Says the only person I know who gets hurt as often as I do,” Beau retorted, frowning. “How many times have we seen you total your motorbike, Yasha, or get in a fistfight with some random stranger?”
“I never said I wasn’t a hypocrite,” Yasha said. “I know I am. But I know my body, and I know how much it can survive, for better or worse. But you, I...”
“I’m not so easily breakable, Yash,” she said gently, leaning forward even though her ribs screamed in protest. “You should know that better than anyone.”
“I guess I’m a slow learner, then.”
“You’ve never been slow.”
Yasha laughed a watery laugh. Rested her large, careful hands on Beau’s shoulders, steadying her, settling the hard and aching parts inside of her. Holding them in the curve of her palm and smiling, I see you. I see you. And here we are anyway.
Here they were.
#
Nothing about them had ever been easy—other than the sex. So they’d focused on the sex. Attraction and bravado and the hard limits of their bodies, those were things they both understood.
What was harder to understand was waking up in the middle of the night, sweaty and sated, her head pillowed on the crook of Yasha’s arm. Peeling her eyes open only to find Yasha already awake, already watching her, eyes bright and searching and utterly unknowable in the dark of the bedroom.
What are you thinking? she always wanted to ask. What do you see when you look at me like that?
But somehow that felt like crossing a line, so Beau never did ask. All she knew was that Yasha was seeing her, was watching her whether it was in between the day-bright laughter of all their friends in Nott’s living room or the small hours of the nights they shared hidden away from the rest of the world. She saw her and she stayed. She left every night before the sun rose but she always came back.
Beau wanted to keep that feeling and hoard it within her bones forever. But it went deeper than only wanting the hard thrill of Yasha’s eyes on her body: there was something soft and unbearable taking root, too. Something about feeling safe, about just plain adoring the person next to her in the bed, about wanting to wake up and cook breakfast for her and see sunlight on her face.
That was where she went wrong, she thought. That was why Yasha left every night. That was why, eventually, Yasha didn’t come back.
Now, now, here they were: Yasha tucked yet another pillow into the pile beneath Beau’s aching head. That unbearable soft something was back in the careful curve of Yasha’s hands, in every line of her body angled toward Beau, in her eyes watching her like always, like they’d never stopped.
Oh, thought Beau. I’d never realized.
#
“If I’d known getting hit by a car was all I had to do to get you to stay the night,” she drawled, “I would’ve done it way sooner.”
“Shut up,” said Yasha, reaching over to pull the blanket up to her chin. “Go to sleep, Beau.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to let myself go unconscious, with the concussion and all?”
“I know you know that’s a myth.” Her voice was so soft, so near. “You need your rest.”
“So do you,” she said.
“So do I,” Yasha agreed, her arm settling heavy across Beau’s waist.
#
The sun spilled through her window, too yellow, too bright. It was late morning.
Beau opened her eyes.
“You’re here,” she said.
Yasha rolled over in bed, and smiled. “Yeah.”
“We overslept.” Beau blinked slowly. “I—wanted to make you breakfast. Eggs.”
“That’s okay,” said Yasha. “There’s always tomorrow.”