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They made ravioli together.
They broke and fixed and broke and fixed the ravioli maker.
And made a pretty decent dinner.
And made some pretty specific promises about the future.
Later, they’re both stuffed, and deep into their second bottle of wine, with the third decanting on the coffee table in front of them in Maura’s fancy pure crystal contraption.
There’s some documentary about some endangered species Jane doesn’t care about playing.
Maura is fully engrossed, but Jane is bored and can’t wait a second longer.
Her head falls forward onto her chest and her eyes form a tight seal against the world as she exhales “I thought about you” then immediately flails back with her neck extended deep, vulnerable, over the back cushions as Maura says, “What?”
And that’s how Jane knows Maura heard her. Because it’s just out of character enough to catch her attention. Just as Maura intended.
Jane isn’t drunk enough to be this vulnerable and Maura isn’t drunk enough to be this clueless.
She fights all of her protective instincts to lift her head, open her eyes, and turn to face Maura.
“I didn’t think about you before I jumped. And I didn’t think about you as I jumped. But after…After I had Paul, and we were just trying to survive?”
Maura puts her nearly empty glass on the coffee table and her breaths are steady in and out at whatever beats per minute some Monk or Yogi taught her long ago.
And Jane mirrors her. She isn’t intimated, she isn’t trying to prove anything; she’s just trying to calm her breaths and her heart rhythm in the way that’s always been tricky when she’s in Maura’s presence.
But she’s long ago learned that following Maura’s lead rarely steers her wrong.
Maura’s expression is begging her to elaborate and Jane has never been able to deny Maura anything.
“I just…you know how the first thing on your list was to do something on my list?”
“Mmhmm”
“The Sox, and the beer, and the ravioli…you were there. It was all with you. I just…”
She’s pouring them both more wine, takes a long sip, and the whole time Maura is quietly chuckling at her well known pattern of vulnerability and retreat.
She silently asks if Maura wants her glass and Maura subtly nods her affirmation. They hold an eye contact that’s less weird than Jane expected and Maura toasts her as she says, “you just need someone to enable you?”
They both laugh and it’s exactly what the moment needed.
Jane loves that Maura, a woman for whom humor was a mostly a theoretical concept before they met, can so effortlessly disarm her now, and it provides more reassurance than the wine does.
“If that’s what I needed, I wouldn’t have picked you.” she says in her lowest register, as she exaggeratedly raises her eyebrows to assure Maura she’s just kidding while she downs another sip.
She puts her glass on the table and Maura follows.
“So what do you need, Jane?”, Maura says in her own lowest register, exhaling Jane’s name in that way she always does. And Jane lets it cascade over her in the way she never does.
“You”
She laughs as she’s saying it. Roils back to her side of the couch. Monitors Maura’s response as she acquiesces and follows up with “When I was drowning, I thought of you, just like this.”
She feels bold as she flashes back to the cold dark Boston water, and finds the strength to continue, “You’d think when I’d thought of all the things I didn’t do…” her eyes are closed again, to Maura’s possible rejection, “...you’d think it’d be you, us, doing…bedroom stuff…”
She hears Maura chuckle again, probably over the glass she picked back up, and it fortifies Jane.
“But it wasn’t…it just…wasn’t. It was just like this. I mean, I already told you about the ravioli and beer.” She laughs again and Maura joins her this time, and Jane opens her eyes involuntarily. They instinctually lock on Maura’s hazel irises, and she’s listening, rapt, without a glass in her hand.
Jane can’t look away.
“It was just this, Maur. This wasn’t the life that flashed before my eyes before I hit the water, but it’s the life I imagined that kept me swimming until dawn. I was swimming back to this.
This couch.
With you.”
She shrugs, and Maura does too, probably in sympathy; those mirror neurons she’s always talking about. Her head is tilted the way it always is when she’s taking in new information. And her expression is one Jane’s not sure she’s ever seen.
She’s beaming.
It makes Jane shy.
She takes another gulp of her probably exorbitantly priced wine, and the sounds of Maura’s knowing chuckle dance along her once-again closed eyelids.
“Jane”
Jane, as usual, is powerless to do anything but obey.
She drinks the rest of her glass in one long practiced sip and then turns, whole body, to look at Maura.
Her smile is still wide but her eyes are admonishing.
“Don’t tell me what that costs, Maura.”
“I won’t” She’s almost coy when she says it, this back and forth they’ve practiced four thousand times.
It makes Jane brave.
“I love you”
Maura gasps, and it immediately causes tears to sprout in Jane’s eyes. It’s pretty rare she catches Maura off-guard.
Maura exhales into a little laugh-sob and then braces herself and looks Jane in the eye before she replies, “I love you too, Jane.”
It’s Jane’s turn for an ungainly exhale. And she follows it up with “It’s not just that. I just…I want…”
“Bedroom stuff?”
Jane throws her head back as she laughs, loud and boisterous, and it sets her at ease more than she ever thought she’d be during this conversation.
“Yeah, eventually. I think.”
“I want that too, Jane.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, how much does this wine cost really because I'm about to chug it!”
Maura says amongst laughter “it’s far less valuable than this conversation we’re having, so have at it. We’re both switching to water when it’s finished though.”
Jane’s hands tremble for the first time all night at Maura’s words as she’s pouring the last drops into Maura’s glass, and she hopes she doesn’t notice.
She always assumed this would require some huge romantic gesture, the kind Jane’s always balked at. She thought it’d be some huge sweeping crescendo after 6 years of foreplay. The ‘denouement’ Maura is always praising in her weird subtitled movies.
But it’s not any of that. It’s as matter of fact as Maura ordering her to switch to water, in the same tone and cadence she always does.
It’s just the two of them, Jane and the best friend she’s ever had, drinking wine and watching God-awful documentaries.
That, more than the better part of 3 bottles of wine coursing through her veins, makes her feel steady, brave.
“Is sitting here on this couch, for as long as we both shall live, the type of thing you might see in your own survival situation?”
Maura does an impressive job working hard not to choke on her wine during the middle clause, and it allows Jane to smile as she takes a casual sip and savors at least a dozen different forms of satisfaction.
“I…imagine you on this couch, a lot. The nights you aren’t here it feels like something’s missing. Something important. Like an enzyme in a DNA reaction. None of it works without you.”
“Is that your nerdy way of saying you miss me when I’m gone?”
Maura takes a regal sip as she confirms with a smile, “that is what I just said, yeah.”
Jane chuckles and puts her glass down again, half empty.
“So now what?”
Maura is still sipping her wine in that intimidating way they only teach in boarding schools, enigmatic, as she volleys, “what do you want, Jane?”
Jane exhales, “you”, with her hands in her lap and Maura melts.
She puts her own glass down too. “I’ll give you anything want, Jane”
Jane’s Catholic guilt overwhelms her, in fear that Maura is offering something out of some perceived responsibility that she’s not ready to give. “No…I don’t. I don’t want to be an obligation. I just want you to be happy. Even if it’s not - ”
Maura disarms her; stops all that toxic programming short as she interrupts with, “You make me happy, Jane. You always have.”
In the lab, she talks in riddles that Jane can only comprehend about 80% of the time, but when it’s just the two of them, she makes it seem so simple.
“You make me happy too, Maur.”
Maura scoots over to Jane’s side of the couch, slow, like she’s afraid to spook her. But Jane isn’t scared.
She’s nervous, more nervous than she’s been even staking out serial murderers. But she’s not scared. And that’s a relatively novel state of being for her, at least since her hands were pinned down with scalpels against a damp basement floor.
Maura takes Jane’s non-dominant hand in both of hers, more gently than Jane can remember since said hand was still covered in bandages, and whispers, like a prayer, “we can take this as slow as you want, my love.”
Jane does that ungainly exhale thing, in a way that is rapidly approaching a sob, but Maura ignores it, eyes locked on Jane’s own with somehow more purpose and determination than Jane’s ever seen.
She knows Maura is silently asking her to say something, anything, but all she can manage is “yeah?”
“Yes. Do you want to set up in the guest room tonight?”
“No. I - I’m not sure. Can I…if we sleep together tonight, can we just sleep together, like usual?”
“Of course we can Jane.”
She exhales in the way she only truly does, with her whole chest, around Maura, and after the subsequent ujjayi breath in, feels steady enough to joke, “no funny business?”
Maura laughingly confirms, “no funny business. I promise.”
She says it casually, but Jane learned long ago not to take any of Maura Isles’ promises lightly.
Maura gets up, clearing glasses and Jane follows her lead, in the same way she always does.
She’s feeling unsteady, again, and she hates that feeling. The sensation that she’s left something unfinished. She’s spent many a night at her desk, with only an hour or so’s rest on Maura’s awful couch, to ward against it.
And so, as she’s turning from a freshly closed fridge, she sees Maura towel-drying an already clean island, more out of habit than anything else, and knows it’s safe to interrupt her without leaving Maura with any sensations of her own unfinished-business for the night.
She pulls Maura close, not too differently than she has dozens of times over the years, but just differently enough that it can’t be read as anything but romantic.
And Maura follows Jane’s lead - drops her dish towel and everything - as effortlessly as she always has.
They sway in Maura’s dimly lit kitchen, clearly on the precipice of something, for a while, until both are completely sure that neither will pull away.
And then they share their first kiss, chaste and sweet. It continues on this grade school level, what Jane would call first base, as Jane’s hands settle on Maura’s lower back, under her blouse. And Maura’s hands find their way back and forth between Jane’s cheeks and her curls.
Just open lips finding each other again and again and again with no ulterior motives, and no tongues daring to break the moment.
They break apart and spend a few minutes swaying, again, but in a much more intimate embrace than before.
And Jane, with her uncanny ability to break a moment, says “Will you get mad at me if I say I'm glad I jumped off that bridge?”
And Maura, ever able to read Jane’s moods, but still unable to lie, hits Jane hard on the shoulder, in the way that makes Jane reel back, but doesn’t actually hurt, as she playfully confirms “yes!” in admonishment.
Jane easily acquiesces “okay” and leans back in for a kiss when Maura goes still and pushes her away with a “WAIT”.
Jane panics, as a thousand thoughts go through her mind as she reads Maura’s stiff body language and instinctively feels every centimeter of the distance between them, before Maura follows up with,
“You’re not hard to love. You’re…well...sometimes I wish you were harder to love, actually…
I don’t. I was angry at you, earlier, when you said that, but you’re not…
I don’t think I ever loved you more than I did when I was looking into that vast starless darkness calling your name…”
Her voice breaks. And Jane has her enveloped back into her arms before she can even finish the last syllable.
Maura is very obviously trying not to cry, and Jane is encouraging her either way with “sshhhs” and “I knows” and “I’m sorrys”
As Maura calms, Jane takes advantage of the fact that they’re not looking at each other, and continues, “I know. I know, Maur. I promise we’ll talk about this later. But it’s like I said before. After we both broke the surface, and I had him in my arms. That was the most I ever loved you”
She pulls back so that they’re making eye contact as she follows up with,
“Until you bought me a ravioli maker.”
Maura bows her head in affection.
Jane takes advantage of it.
Kisses her on the forehead. Kisses her on the cheeks and the nose and then finally says against her lips, “I’d jump off a hundred bridges if that’s what it took to get us here.”
“Please don’t!”
Maura’s startle broke them apart enough so that it's easy for Jane to hold her hands up in surrender, like she’s a perp, “I’m sorry I’m sorry. You’d told me not to joke, and I won’t. I just meant.”
“I know what you meant.” Maura says with more understanding than Jane probably deserves.
They take the space apart to finish their chores: putting recycling in its diligently labeled place, turning off lights, returning the couch throw to its meticulous drape, as Jane stews in her mistake, sure Maura’s thoughtful silence is dedicated to a way to undo everything that happened tonight.
They meet in their years-long choreographed dance, at the bottom of the stairs, like usual, and Jane can’t wait another moment.
Apparently neither of them can, because they say almost simultaneously,
“I’m sorry.”
“Remember Hoyt cut my throat, right before the guard tased me”
“Maura!”
“I’m not trying to-”
“No, I get it. I get it. I do. I’m sorry. I just didn’t expect that.” She says the last past as a laugh even though none of it’s funny. She just wants Maura to know she’s not mad.
And Maura knows, like she always does, with that empathetic/apologetic head tilt, and Jane’s hands in her own as she continues,
“I wasn’t trying to teach you a lesson Jane. I was just thinking of my most terrifying counterpart to the bridge. I’d do that a hundred times too.”
Jane hugs her tight, before either of them know what’s happening. Jane’s arms resolute around Maura’s waist, as Maura’s arms find their comfortable place around Jane’s neck, where she holds on just as strong.
Jane says softly into Maura’s cheek,
“You were right, we shouldn’t talk about it.”
They both chuckle as Maura confirms,
“I really wasn’t trying to make a point”
“I know. I know. That’s why it worked”.
When Jane pulls back she’s sporting a mostly-fake smile that Maura automatically mirrors.
“I really don’t want to talk about this anymore, can we just go to bed?”
“Of course we can, Jane.”
“I haven’t..uh..I mean i haven’t slept. I mean I’ve slept but…”
Maura starts moving, bringing Jane along with her by their joined hands.”I know Jane, let's go to bed.”
“So it’s just that easy?”
Maura laughs in disbelief. They both know the road to tonight was anything but easy, but that’s a conversation that will come with the sun and Maura knows it.
“I think we’ve earned a little bit of easy, don’t you?”
She’s coy again, sexy in a way that throws Jane after the depth of the mini-conversation they just had. And Jane may be stupid enough to fling herself off a bridge into the dark cold Boston unknown, but she’s nowhere near stupid enough to second-guess this easy affection Maura is offering after a night of hard-won revelations.
She assuredly states “I do” as she lets Maura lead her by the hand up the staircase, and they barely make it up three steps before Jane’s strong arms are tightly holding herself against Maura’s perfectly postured spine, her lips seeking Maura’s long pale neck, and Maura’s half-heartedly admonishing her with stair-safety statistics as Jane’s delighted laughter fills the darkness.