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i.
“Happy birthday, princess,” said Ned Stark, pressing a kiss to his eldest daughter’s cheek, and pouring himself a coffee as Sansa opened her presents at the breakfast table: a book token from Robb, because older brothers were just like that; a stuffed animal, a wolf, from Bran (and Rickon); a pair of knitting needles and a ball of wool that were clearly Arya’s idea of a joke.
“And this,” said Catelyn Stark, pushing a pink envelope with Sansa’s name written on it across the table, “is from your father and I.”
“Is it-?” It wasn’t legal to take the SoulMates test before you were eighteen, and you needed parental permission even to book the test before your birthday. Sansa opened the envelope and spared a quick glance at the birthday card - it had the number 18 surrounded by balloons on it - before shaking out the appointment card. Today. Two pm. “Thank you.”
“Well,” said Catelyn, her lips pursing unhappily, “it was the only thing that you asked for.”
“I can’t believe you asked for a boyfriend for your eighteenth,” said Arya, smirking, “that’s so sad.”
Before Sansa could retort that Arya was too little to understand, Robb chimed in, “You could have asked for a car.” That was what Robb had asked for, and received from their parents, when he’d turned eighteen last year.
“You could have asked for another dog,” suggested Bran. Sansa raked her nails through the thick fur on Lady’s back, having reached out as the big husky padded through the kitchen in search of crumbs.
“No more dogs,” said Ned Stark automatically.
“I’ll pick you up from school at lunchtime, Sansa, and drive you to the clinic,” said Catelyn. “That way you don’t have to take the bus.”
“But-” began Sansa, winding up to argue that she should be allowed to take the whole day off; it was her birthday, after all, and she had the most important appointment of her life this afternoon.
“Don’t start,” said Catelyn. “Sansa, Arya, Bran: shoes, bags, school, now.” Before Sansa could try to argue her mother had already turned her attention to chivvying Robb along to college and wrangling Rickon for daycare.
*
Catelyn pulled the car to a halt outside the gleaming chrome and glass SoulMates testing centre. Sansa angled the rearview mirror and reapplied her lipgloss, she gathered her bag and jacket, and opened the passenger side door.
“You don’t have to go in,” said Catelyn.
“Mum-” Sansa had wanted this, to meet the boy who was meant for her and only her, since she was six.
“At least, you don’t have to do it today. Not everyone takes the test as soon as they turn eighteen, your brother didn’t.”
Robb still hadn’t taken the SoulMates test. He said that the test, and his match, would still be there when he was older, and that in the meantime there were a lot of cute girls at college, which, eww.
“Jon did, though,” Sansa countered. Her cousin getting matched with someone else had once and for all ended his turbulent relationship with his high school girlfriend, and not a second too soon; it wasn’t just that Sansa had always viscerally disliked Dany, it was that Jon and Ygritte were so obviously meant for one another that their relationship alone would have been proof, had Sansa needed any, that the test worked.
A car behind them honked. “Go on, then,” instructed Catelyn. “I’ll park the car and meet you in reception.”
Sansa stepped out, closed the door behind her, and bent down to the open window. “Um, mum?” she said. “Thank you again. I know that these tests are expensive.”
Catelyn snorted, and Sansa’s grin turned sheepish; expensive wasn’t half of it, the test that would connect Sansa with her soulmate had probably cost more than Robb’s car, more than Lady had ever cost, even after Joffrey had lied about her biting him and her public liability insurance had tripled.
The price tag was one of the bigger criticisms out there of the SoulMates test - though the possibility that her match might be someone who couldn’t afford to take the test had never been something Sansa had given much thought to.
Sansa walked into the testing centre, appointment card gripped tight between her fingers.
*
Biology was not one of Sansa’s best subjects, and even if it had been, exactly how SoulMates identified people’s matches was a closely guarded corporate secret defended by a phalanx of ferocious lawyers armed with an unlimited budget.
All that anyone knew was that it was some kind of genetic test; they pricked Sansa’s fingertip, swabbed her cheek, scanned her retina, and left her to wait alone in a sterile white room, for hours.
The door opened and a woman dressed in something like a nurse’s uniform entered. “Congratulations,” she said, smiling at Sansa, “you’ve got a match. Hardly anyone who comes in on their eighteenth birthday gets that lucky. It takes time usually, you know, for both people to take the test.”
“I always knew I’d match,” said Sansa, beaming.
“A true believer,” said the woman, “you love to see it.” She offered Sansa the tablet she’d been holding.
Sansa couldn’t help snatching for the tablet. Onscreen was a headshot of her soulmate, and some brief biographical information. The words blurred in Sansa’s vision and she couldn’t look at anything other that the picture.
“...This, um, I think there’s been a mistake?”
“Oh, honey,” said the woman, suddenly her smile seemed condescending, “we don’t make mistakes here.”
*
Sansa’s mother was waiting for her in reception. Sansa walked over, her schoolbag clutched tight to her chest.
“Sansa?” asked Catelyn. “What happened? Is everything alright?”
“I’m fine.” Weirdly, of all her siblings, Sansa was probably the best liar. “I just- I didn’t get a match.’
“Oh, Sansa,” said Catelyn. “I’m sorry. I know you’d gotten your hopes up. But, you know what, when you start college after the summer you’ll meet new people and make new friends, and then in a few years your match will take the test and when you finally meet him it will all have been worth the wait.”
“Er, yeah,” said Sansa. “I know you talked about taking me out for a birthday treat, but can we maybe just go home, please?”
*
Catelyn insisted on at least stopping at the drive through for one of those elaborate, iced, coffee adjacent drinks that Sansa liked. “Hey, mum,” Sansa asked, balancing her drink between her knees, “how come you never took the test?”
“I know it’s hard for people your age to imagine, but there was no test when your dad and I were growing up.”
Well, yeah. Obviously Sansa knew that the test had only been around for less than two decades, but imagining a world without the test was like imagining a world without the internet, or a world where people rode around on horses and challenged each other to duels.
“Yeah, but what about after?”
Many of Sansa’s classmates had parents who divorced after one or the other of them had taken the test and matched to someone else, but Sansa had always told herself that her mum and dad were different, they really were soulmates.
“I was friends with your Uncle Brandon first,” said Catelyn, her eyes flicking sideways to Sansa, “and I must have been around your age when he first introduced me to his brother. At first I thought Ned was boring, cold, and ordinary...and if there had been a test that told me he was the one I would have missed out on the experience of finding out what a kind, generous, beautiful man your father really is, and if the test had matched me with somebody else I would have missed out on Ned entirely.”
“Oh, mum...”
“I know that things are different for your generation, and I know that we can’t go back to world before the test; I’m just saying that whether or not you get matched, there is someone wonderful out there for you.”
*
Arya and Bran were playing video games in the living room, or more accurately, they were wrestling over who had to play with the wonky controller. Catelyn moved to separate them, and Sansa took advantage of the distraction to flee upstairs to her bedroom.
She dug right down to the bottom of her backpack where she’d stashed the printed file that SoulMates had given her; Sansa flicked it open to the blown up photo of the brunette with the knowing, lopsided smile. Margaery Tyrell.
It wasn’t like Sansa thought that there was anything wrong with being gay. She had been pretty sure that Arya was right up until that time when they’d gone to Uncle Robert’s (who wasn’t an uncle, but a friend of their dad’s who insisted they call him uncle) and Gendry had been out front doing yard work shirtless and Arya had nearly walked right into traffic.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with being gay, it was just that Sansa wasn’t.
ii.
Margaery was about to make her excuses and leave the boozy lunch she’d been having with her brother and his boyfriend. She adored Loras, and had grown quite fond of Renly, but Prosecco made them even more sickeningly romantic than usual.
Her phone pinged on the table and Margaery flipped it over, grateful for an excuse to look away from Loras and Renly, who were getting rather handsy. She felt her face freeze as the SoulMates logo flashed up onscreen; Margaery had taken the test two years ago only because Loras had wanted somebody to hold his hand. Their results had matched Loras with Renly, and Margaery with no one at all, which she had regarded as the best of all possible outcomes.
“What’s wrong?” asked Loras. “You look like you just swallowed a wasp. Is it grandmother?” He made a grab for her phone, and damn he was quick. “Ho ho,” he said, “she’s cute. Look-” he angled the phone so that Renly could see too.
Margaery stamped her high heel onto the arch of Loras’ foot and snatched her phone back. Her match was cute, Margaery had always had a thing for redheads, and her name, Sansa, rolled off her tongue in a pleasing manner. Margaery scrolled down through the smattering of biographical information SoulMates had included.
“She’s an infant,” said Margaery flatly.
“Huh?” said Loras, and Margaery held the phone up having zoomed in on Sansa Stark’s date of birth. Her brother frowned, mental arithmetic never had been Loras’ strong suit.
Renly got there faster. “She must have taken the test the second she turned eighteen,” he said. “That’s sweet. She’s a romantic.”
“Eighteen from twenty-five,” mused Loras, still frowning. “What’s that, seven years? It’s not a huge age difference. I mean, not in the grand scheme of things.”
“She’s a foetus,” said Margaery, “a zygote.”
*
“Say hello to your child bride,” said Olenna Tyrell, not looking up from her newspaper as Margaery took a swig of coffee, a bite of toast, kissed her cheek, and headed out to start her day.
Margaery’s grandmother shared her perhaps cynical belief that it wasn’t necessarily that the test worked, but that Loras would have fallen head over heels for any hot, rich guy that SoulMates had matched him with.
Loras had reacted with somewhat more serious concern when Margaery had told them that she’d arranged to meet the zygote in person. “I know you think you’ve just agreed to meet this girl to let her down gently, but it’s not like that when you meet your match. When I first met Renly-”
“I saw what it was like when you first met Renly, Loras-” said Margaery, and because they slept in adjoining rooms and shared a bathroom “-and what I didn’t see, I heard.”
*
Any desire Margaery might otherwise have had to jump Sansa Stark’s bones would have been killed stone dead by the fact that they were meeting at eleven in the morning because that was when Sansa had a free period, and in this park because it was just around the corner from her high school.
Margaery sat on a bench, half-heartedly scrolling through work e-mails on her phone until she looked up and saw her approaching. The zygote.
Sansa Stark looked like she was taller in flats than Margaery was in heels, and, okay, having a good few inches on her was a feature common to every woman Margery had ever pursued, and her long red hair looked like it would be silky to the touch...and Margaery was going to stop that train of thought right there in its tracks.
“Um, Margaery?” asked Sansa, with a ridiculously childish yet somehow endearing little wave. “Hi.”
“Hey,” said Margaery, standing and brushing down her skirt just for something to do with her hands.
“Do, um,” said Sansa, “do you want to sit or walk?”
“Let’s walk,” said Margaery. She was basically here to break up with this girl who she had no intention of ever going out with, something that would probably be less awkward if they weren’t looking right at each other.
They fell into step. “The thing is,” began Sansa. “The thing is. This is the thing: you seem great, wonderful really, but-”
“Hang on,” said Margaery, “are you about to ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ me?”
“It isn’t you. It really is me,” Sansa insisted earnestly, “I’m not gay.”
Margaery tried not to laugh, she really did. If Sansa was telling the truth then it was the worst Margaery’s gaydar had ever backfired, which was beside the point, obviously. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I came here today to let you down gently.”
“Oh,” said Sansa, “are you not-?”
“Oh, no,” said Margaery, and borrowed a phrase of Loras’, “I am flagrantly homosexual. But the age difference was a bit too big for comfort.”
“The age difference?”
“You do realise that I’m older than you, right?”
“Yes, of course,” said Sansa, in the tone of voice of someone to whom this was only just occurring. “I guess I was more focused on the fact that you were a girl. Woman, I mean. You are a woman.”
Margaery slowed to a stop and turned to face Sansa. “Look, I’ve never been a great believer in the test, or really wanted a match. My brother wanted us to take it together and I was humouring him. And it seems like you have some issues with your sexuality that you need to work through-” Sansa opened her mouth to speak but Margaery plowed on “-as well as high school to finish. So why don’t we both just chalk this up to experience and leave it at that.”
“Okay,” said Sansa. “Unless...”
“Unless?”
“I’ve been reading up...I had to go pretty far back through the search results, but I found this forum for people where it hadn’t worked out with their match.”
“Hang on,” said Margaery, “don’t SoulMates claim that they are never wrong?”
“I think they say they have something like a ninety-eight percent success rate.”
“Ah.”
“But a lot of these people said that staying in touch with their match helped. Like, just because you aren’t a couple doesn’t mean that you aren’t meant to be in each other’s lives.”
It occurred to Margaery that Sansa had taken the test as soon as she was able; she was a romantic and a true believer, and matching with an indifferent adult before she was ready to come out even to herself must have been a real blow. “So...you want us to be friends?”
“I mean, maybe?” Margaery’s expression must still have been unconvinced, because Sansa quickly added, “Maybe just on social media, at least at first.”
Most of Margaery’s social media usage was scrolling past the shirtless photos of Renly that Loras posted intercut with his hair care routine, so: “Sure.”
Sansa grinned. “Great. I’ll add you.” She leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to Margary’s cheek, her coconut scented hair swinging into Margaery's face. Sansa stepped back, gave another little wave, turned on heel and walked away.
*
It wasn’t that Margaery needed a moment to compose herself after meeting Sansa Stark, it was just that she really, really wanted a latte, so she sat outside a cafe for half an hour, breathing deeply.
The first thing that popped up on her computer screen when she finally went back to the office, even before the truly absurd number of messages regarding the upcoming fundraiser, was a friend request from, of course, Sansa Stark..
Fine, thought Margaery, I can always mute her later. Accept.
iii.
Robb had been right: there were a lot of cute girls at college. But even at his smuggest, Sansa’s know-it-all big brother could never have foreseen this: Sansa making out with Daenerys Targaryen on top of a pile of coats in the spare bedroom of the Lannister house while a party raged on outside.
Dany moved from Sansa’s mouth to her throat, then pulled away and sat up, reaching for her cup of Tyrion Lannister’s eye-watering punch. Sansa didn’t drink and had no such excuses for their spontaneous makeout session, beyond the fact that she’d learned a lot about herself over the last couple of years, and one of those things was that her borderline pathological hatred of Jon’s ex-girlfriend as a teenager had apparently been some sort of deeply repressed attraction.
“I did not expect to see you of all people here.” Dany took a sip of her drink, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, further smearing her lipstick.
“I’m roommates with Brienne. I, uh, don’t know if you know her? She’s Jaime Lannister’s new girlfriend.”
After months of back and forth, of talking Sansa’s ear off long into the night, of wanting to but being afraid of being unmatchable, Brienne had taken the test. Sansa had gone with her and her match had come back almost immediately: Jaime Lannister.
Brienne and Jaime were exactly the sort of couple the test was meant for: two people who never would have looked twice at each other, who you couldn’t really imagine as a couple, until you saw them together, and then you couldn’t imagine them with anyone else.
“SoulMates’ newest poster couple,” said Dany, taking another swig of her drink and grimacing. “It’s not like it’s that simple for some of us.”
“Hang on,” said Sansa, “you took the test?”
“Years ago, now. But my match only came through this week. Yara Greyjoy. Half owns a bait shop with her brother, and only took the test because she inherited some money from her dickhead uncle and wanted to ‘piss it away on stuff that doesn’t matter.’”
“She sounds...nice.” Dany laughed, and Sansa propped herself up on her elbows, only now realising that Dany had, at some point while they were kissing, unhooked her bra. “I’m going to go out on a limb here, and guess your problem isn’t that you matched with a woman.”
“I have plans, big plans. And Yara is not exactly the sort of person I'd pictured having by my side, you know?.”
“Well,” said Sansa, “if I were you I’d avoid the term ‘trophy wife’ and just tell her that she’s not your type.”
“Oh, no,” said Dany carelessly, “she’s so exactly my type that as soon as I met her I wanted her to rail me through the nearest horizontal surface. You know how it is when you first meet your match.”
“...Not really,” admitted Sansa.
“No? Huh. Jon and I always had you down as the type of girl who’d take the test the second she turned eighteen.”
Sansa blushed. “That’s exactly who I was, but I was also so deep in the closet that I didn’t even realise I was in there. It’s no wonder that she thought I was too young.”
“Does your mystery woman have a name?” Dany asked.
“Margaery Tyrell.”
“Maybe you should reach out,” Dany suggested. “No one’s eighteen and stupid forever, and-” she took in Sansa’s generally unbuttoned appearance “-it’s not like you’re in the closet anymore.”
*
Over the last few years Sansa and Margaery’s social media communications had been limited to generic Happy Birthdays, and Happy Holidays; Margaery had liked Sansa’s graduation photos, and Sansa had typed a one line reply congratulating Margaery on getting a better job at a different non-profit.
So when Sansa sent Margaery the message: I just spent the night making out with the girl I hated more than anyone else in high school - well, she was stepping well outside the bounds of their previously established relationship.
As soon as she hit send Sansa wanted the the ground to open up and swallow her, but then her phone pinged with a reply: I knew it :)
iv.
That first late night message opened the floodgates.
Margaery and Sansa spoke most days, either by text or direct message. Margaery had gotten a good laugh out of watching Sansa like, unlike, like, unlike, and then finally like again a holiday photo of Margaery in a bikini, and then Loras had cracked up watching Margaery go endlessly back and forth over whether it would be weird to send flowers for Sansa’s college graduation (in the end she’d sent the flowers with no card.)
Margaery was sitting on Loras’ couch surrounded by wedding planning detritus when her phone pinged.
“That’s her, isn’t it? The zygote.” Loras smirked, and Margaery rolled her eyes. “I can tell from the look on your face.”
The message was, in fact, from Sansa. “She’s just letting me know that she arrived safely. She’s back in town and staying with her parents for a bit while she interviews for jobs.”
“Hey,” said Loras brightly, “if she’s in town anyway, why don’t we invite her to the wedding?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Come on,” wheedled Loras. “We can make room for one more. I’ll have Renly bump Stannis to a reception only invite.”
“I am not seeing Sansa in person for the first time in five years wearing the maid of honour dress that you picked out for me.”
“But you are going to see her, right?”
Margaery shrugged. “We haven’t arranged anything definite. We only ever met in person that once, and I’m still older than she is.”
Loras thumped Margaery’s upper arm. “Ow, Loras! What the fuck?”
“I get that situations like this are why they don’t let you take the test until you’re eighteen. If you’d matched when you were eighteen and she was eleven that would have been...”
“Illegal?” suggested Margaery.
“And I get why you thought eighteen and twenty-five was...iffy, but the difference between twenty-three and twenty-nine is no big deal, and by the time she’s thirty-five you’ll be...” Loras had once again met his nemesis, mental arithmetic.
“Forty-two,” Margaery supplied.
“Exactly!” said Loras. “Get her now while you’re still hot.”
Margaery rolled her eyes and threw a seating plan at Loras.
*
Margaery buried her face in her mattress and pulled a pillow over her head to shield her hangover from her ringing phone.
It couldn’t be work, she had booked the day after Loras’ wedding off ages ago; she had known that the champagne hangover was going to be brutal, and she could have guessed that the grooms wouldn’t leave the dance floor until gone three in the morning.
She groaned, looked at the clock, and realised that it was somehow already half-past eleven. She fumbled for her phone. “Yeah, hi, hello.”
“Margaery, hey.” It was funny, she and Sansa hadn’t talked on the phone all that much, it was mostly all texts and social media, but she still immediately recognised the younger woman’s voice, and she smiled into her pillow. “I’m, um, not disturbing you, am I? You sound a little groggy.”
“No, no” said Margaery, pushing herself up to sit against the headboard and clearing her throat. “I swear I’m not usually still in bed at this hour, but it was my brother’s wedding yesterday, and it was a big day.”
“I know,” said Sansa, “I’ve seen the photos.”
“Wait,” asked Margaery, “how have you seen Loras and Renly’s wedding photos?”
“Loras sent me a friend request ages ago.”
Margaery let the back of her skull thunk gently against the headboard. “Of course he did.”
“You looked nice.”
Oh, so Sansa Stark was a tease. “My brother picked out the dress. I usually look a lot better than that.”
“Oh, I bet. I do think you looked cute, though.” Okay, so the fizzing sensation in Margaery’s stomach had little to do with the after-effects of the champagne. “I hope it’s okay that I called,” Sansa continued. “I just got out of my interview and I was thinking of you.”
Margaery’s mouth curved into a smile. “Were you really?”
“Well, they mentioned you by name, so...”
“Huh?”
“I was interviewing at SoulMates, for their advertising department. They brought out my file, they knew when I’d taken the test and who I’d matched with, and they asked how things were going with us.”
“What the hell,” Margaery said, “is that even legal?”
“That’s exactly what I said,” replied Sansa, “so I don’t think I’m getting that job.”
“I mean, what would your slogan for them even have been: SoulMates: it’s more complicated than that?”
There was a long, loaded pause before Sansa said, “That’s certainly a message I could have done with hearing as a kid.”
“Hey,” said Margaery, suddenly and without fully meaning to, “in full appreciation that this might not be the moment, do you maybe want to meet me for a drink later?”
This time there was no pause before Sansa said, “I’d really like that.”
v.
Sansa stepped nervously out of the taxi and saw Margaery Tyrell waiting for her. The funny thing was, the first time Sansa had met Margaery she had been so in denial and so self-involved in the way that only eighteen year-olds can be that she hadn’t stopped to consider whether Margaery was attractive, or even likeable. Well, Sansa had been speaking to Margaery at least once a day for more than a year now, so she definitely liked her, and even in the grips of compulsory heterosexuality Sansa had thought that Margaery was pretty, and five years later it was impossible to ignore that she was also really hot.
It wasn’t exactly like how Dany had described meeting Yara, it was more like how Jon described meeting Ygritte or Brienne spoke about Jaime: an insistent tug low in Sansa’s belly that was like Yes, her.
“Hi,” said Margaery, offering Sansa her arm to lead her into the bar. “Shall we?”
The bar Margaery had picked out for them turned out to be a pop-up dry bar that only served non-alcoholic cocktails. They found seats and Sansa asked, “Are you still a little delicate after the wedding?”
“No,” said Margaery, and Sansa filed away the fact that Margaery Tyrell was a brazen, if terrible fibber away for future reference. “But you don’t drink, right?”
Sansa couldn’t remember if she’d ever told Margaery that in so many words. “Did I-?”
“I’m observant like that.” Sansa’s arched her eyebrow in a question, and Margaery said, “All of the photos you ever posted where you were at parties or bars, you never had a drink in your hand.”
“That’s very-”
“Stalkerish?” Margaery suggested with a self-deprecating half smile.
“Very thoughtful, I was going to say,” said Sansa, picking up the drinks menu.
*
You would never have guessed that there was no alcohol in the cocktails by the amount of giggling that was going on at Sansa and Margaery’s table by drink three.
Sansa took a sip of her virgin White Russian (cream, vanilla extract, and strongly brewed coffee; i.e. Sansa’s three favourite things) leaned across the table and took Margaery’s hand. “Can I tell you something embarrassing?”
Margaery smirked and squeezed Sansa’s hand. “Oh, please do.”
“So...as soon as we matched I looked you up online, and I found a picture of you with Loras, so I called SoulMates and said there must have some kind of mistake and I must have been meant to match with him instead.” Margaery burst into helpless laughter. “In my defence,” continued Sansa, “at the time, my ideal guy was really pretty, had beautifully conditioned hair, and was totally sexually unavailable, so...”
“What did SoulMates say?”
“The person who answered the phone didn’t actually laugh at me,” Sansa winced at the memory, “but I could tell she wanted to.”
Margaery’s eyes flicked down to where they were holding hands across the table. “Do you, uh, want to get out of here?”
“God, yes,” said Sansa. “I’ve been waiting for you to ask.”
*
Margaery unlocked the door to her flat, and grinning at Sansa, ushered her inside.
“Have you been here long?” The flat was beautiful, with wooden floorboards and minimalist furnishings.
“Two years or so.” Margaery shrugged out of her coat, and took Sansa’s, her palms skimming over Sansa’s bare shoulders. “Since Loras moved in with Renly and our Grandmother retired somewhere warmer.”
“It’s lovely.” Sansa let Margaery lead her over to the couch. There was a spray of flowers in a vase on the coffee table, as well as two framed photos, one of Margaery and Loras and another of an older woman with a steely glint in her eyes who could only be the infamous Olenna Tyrell. “Right now I’m sharing a room with my sister Arya who kept me up until one last night yelling at a video game where she pretends to be a ninja.”
One side of Margaery’s mouth curved into a suggestive smile. “You’re welcome to stay here with me tonight. I wasn’t planning on kicking you out after-” Margaery’s eyes widened, and she cut herself off. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not presuming anything.” She stood hurriedly and said, “I’ll put some coffee on.”
“Hey,” said Sansa, catching Margaery’s hand, “there was a lot of caffeine in that White Russian, I don’t need any more coffee.” She tugged Margaery down until their mouths met. The undeniable tug of recognition in Sansa’s belly intensified.
Sansa reclined back on the couch and Margaery followed her, her brown curls tumbling down around them. There was a brief, awkward moment - “Sorry, sorry,” Margaery pulled away and pushed her hair back so that it wasn’t getting in Sansa’s mouth; “No, no, it’s fine,” Sansa shifted so that her leg wasn’t trapped at an awkward angle - and then they were kissing again, Margaery’s weight settling pleasantly against Sansa.
Margaery squeezed Sansa thigh, and Sansa drew her knee up and arched into the touch. Margaery ran her hand over Sansa’s hip and up under her top, her hand splaying over Sansa’s ribs - just ticklish enough to make Sansa writhe up against her.
“Is this okay?” Margaery breathed against Sansa’s ear.
“Margaery-” Sansa whined, and then because, yeah, communication was important, she pushed Margaery back by her shoulders and leveraged herself into a half-sitting position. Margaery, obviously thinking she had crossed some kind of unspoken line, retreated all the way to the other end of the sofa. “I’m not a virgin, Margaery.”
“I- what?”
Sansa followed Margaery and cupped her cheek, tucking a loose curl behind her ear. “I know I was young and inexperienced when we first met, but it’s not like I spent the entirety of college pining after you waiting for this night. I agreed to come home with you because I thought we both wanted the same thing. We do, don’t we,” Sansa dropped her hand from Margaery’s cheek to her throat, her breast, her hip, “want the same thing?”
“Bedroom?” Margaery suggested. “Unless,” she added with a lopsided smirk, “the couch is working for you.”
“Bedroom, I think,” said Sansa, “at least the first time.”
*
“Holy shit,” said Margaery, afterwards.
“Wow,” said Sansa. “I know people say it’s different with your match, but...”
“Holy shit,” repeated Margaery. “I am so, so glad you called this morning.”
“Don’t tell Loras I told you,” began Sansa, “but the interview wasn’t the only reason I called.”
“Wait,” Margaery looked adorably confused, her post-orgasm brain obviously as fuzzy as Sansa’s, “what has Loras got to do with anything?”
“He’s planning a surprise party for your thirtieth.” Margaery groaned theatrically and buried her face in a pillow, and Sansa wasn’t sure if it was because of her brother, the surprise party, or the existential dread of turning thirty. “He wanted me to be there to surprise you, but I thought that maybe we should meet beforehand so that if you still weren’t interested and wanted to blow me off then you could do it without your entire family looking on.”
“That’s very-”
“I was overthinking it, I know.”
“No,” said Margaery, “it was very considerate. You are going to come to the party, right?”
“I mean,” Sansa said awkwardly, plucking at the sheets, “only if you want me there.”
“I want that more than anything, except-” Margaery pinned Sansa’s wrists above her head, grinning brazenly, and straddled her hips “-maybe round two?”
Sansa squirmed, arched up against Margaery, and said, “Back to the couch, then?”