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Nights had taken new shape for Jess ever since she brought Lupe home with her. Once they settled into the place Jess had always known best and always felt safest, their dynamic waxed and stretched into something beyond what it was in Rockford. It was initially heated and pressed, frenetic and consuming, until it deepened into more. Until moments turned sweet and slow and tender – soft kisses and gentle touch and intertwined limbs. Jess felt intoxicated by it, and a little disbelieving, when they started spending every night in the same bed. She cherished every minute they spent warm and hazy and woven together.
Lupe had told Jess about her brain-spinning, worrying, sleepless nights, but Jess never saw them. In their bed together, Lupe rested easy. She let herself fall deep and settled into Jess, and Jess lived for Lupe’s soft breath on her neck, Lupe’s arm around her, their legs tangled together. It only felt syrupier and richer to know that that ease was something special to Jess, something Lupe had found just in her.
They both appreciated the way boxers and undershirts left ample bare skin to bare skin. Jess loved the sated heat of Lupe against her every night, after going so long thinking she didn’t want, or believing she couldn’t have, the luxury of such domestic intimacy.
But as winter approached, Lupe’s southern blood caught up with her. First, they piled on blankets. Then Lupe started adding her own layers until she was back in the pajamas she wore in Rockford. Usually, Lupe’s cold hands would find their way to Jess’s core, calloused palms to soft skin and body heat. Once, Jess wrapped Lupe’s freezing hands in her own instead, and Lupe, half asleep, brought their intertwined fingers to her lips. A single sleepy kiss of gratitude, something so sweet and gentle that existed in the blur of midnight hours.
Jess saw it all, felt every soft touch during the night, because while Lupe’s nights were no longer sleepless, Jess’s had become so. Lupe had been with her in Moose Jaw for only three months, and Jess already knew she loved her. It was something she wrestled with every night, made no easier by how precious the moments in the dark, behind closed doors, were to her. Her being awake was as much savoring and appreciating as it was worrying and ruminating.
At first, her darker racing thoughts surrounded the fear of ruining the special thing they had, of spooking Lupe into the shadowy corners of her mind, of scaring her to the point of running away. Jess was afraid of losing. It wasn’t hard for her to admit that. It was hard, though, for her to admit to herself that she loved Lupe. That was until it started to become easier for Jess to believe that maybe Lupe loved her too.
Jess could dismiss the heated moments as fueled largely by lust and arousal. She could write off the moments of connection and understanding as the bond of shared and similar life experiences. But there were the soft and tender moments –
Like when they were alone in the farmhouse cooking dinner one night, and Jess was at the stove when Lupe came up behind her, wrapping her arms around Jess’s waist and resting her head on Jess’s shoulder. They stayed like that far longer than Jess would have expected outside of their bedroom, and when they broke for Lupe to set the table, she kissed Jess’s temple softly and let her touch linger with a warmth that made Jess feel full and treasured.
Like when Lupe would put her hand on Jess’s thigh while Jess was driving the old truck down the quiet, dusty back roads that she knew so well, or when Lupe would slide away from the passenger-side window into the center of the truck’s bench seat to press her thigh against Jess’s. At first, she’d hidden the move under the guise of leaning over to point out something through Jess’s side of the windshield, but soon Jess saw through the act and called Lupe on it. Instead of quitting the move altogether, she just quit the act and let Jess take it for what it was.
Like when Lupe caught up to Jess in initiating thick and syrupy and indulgent late-night and early-morning touches, or when she started waking Jess up with slow and affectionate kisses so full of tenderness and appreciation and full-body warmth. Or when, later on, Lupe knew without complaint or conversation the extent of Jess’s sleeplessness, and she wouldn’t wake Jess at all.
And there were startlingly raw and shivery moments too –
Like when one night the sound of wolves barking and howling rattled through the cluster of farmhouses nearby, and Jess jumped to her feet in a flurry of curses, pulling on clothes and boots as quickly as she could. She never expected Lupe to follow her out, but just moments after Jess reached the flock, she saw Lupe slipping through the house’s backdoor. Together, they herded all of the sheep from their lot into the barn by moonlight while Jess ranted about the irresponsibility of some neighbors leaving food out for the deer. “It helps no one,” she had huffed. “The deer become reliant on it, and eating the wrong shit can cause bloat, which can be fucking fatal, and all it does is bring the predators that hunt the deer closer to the livestock.” It wasn’t until they closed the barn door, all the sheep safely inside, that she really looked at Lupe – at her grimy coat over top her soft pajamas, her muck boots rucking up her pants legs, her bedhead and still sleep-bleary eyes. Lupe had jumped in headfirst, following Jess as if any concern of Jess’s was an automatic concern to Lupe as well.
Like when Jess worried about her brothers overseas, Lupe would sit with her by the radio, early in the morning or late into the night. She would wrap herself around Jess, or just hold her hand as a solid anchor, or help pass the minutes playing cards and listening in shared silence for news, good or bad. Some nights she would ask Jess questions about her brothers, or about their growing up together, while Jess penned letters to each brother that might never reach them. But Lupe listened to each story with such sincere reverence that her steady gaze almost made Jess feel raw and unraveled. Jess could tell she wanted to know, and she showed it over and over when she remembered the details of the lives woven into the physical spaces on the McCready farm.
But, even with moments of such reassurance, Jess’s mind still got away from her when she knew in her bones that she couldn’t tell Lupe she loved her without asking her – begging her, Jess would even beg her – to stay. And she was all too aware of the risk that could bring.
There was one night, when Jess was barely 21, where that awareness knocked her on her ass in a way it wouldn’t again until she experienced a bar raid in a big city years later. That particular night, though, she was just going into town to a little queer sanctuary sitting innocuously in the backroom of a mediocre restaurant.
She was leaving home after a slight scuffle with her father, him protesting her decision to go out alone. She took every opportunity, the infrequent evenings when her brothers were otherwise occupied, to go to the secreted haven. But that night her father resisted, in his understanding but final tone. Jess, though, had never been one to yield and appease, so she just grabbed the keys and walked out the front door.
She made it to the driver’s side of the car, opening the door with perhaps a bit too much frustrated force, before her father followed her out. “Jess,” he sighed, resigning to the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to stop her. He knew her well enough to turn to guidance rather than authority. “Please be careful.”
He was never a worrier, never one to coddle, so his uncharacteristic caution struck her like ice to her veins. He knew there was something out there for her more dangerous than Saskatchewan wildlife or rugged farm life. She shut the car door again, gentler now, and turned to him with an expression she tried to school back into irritation rather than the sudden pounding panic. “What do you mean?”
“Kid, I know what kind of place you’re going to, and while we – your brothers and I – we don’t care, never have… there are people who do, who will care.” He paused for a moment, like he was trying to find the right words, and his face contorted in a pained way Jess hadn’t seen before. “I don’t need you to be anything you’re not, but I need to know that you’ll make it home each night.”
For a moment, it crushed her – his acceptance, his tenderness, his fear. It could break her, so she pushed it all down, deep into her gut, to keep her expression neutral. “I will, Pa. I promise I’m careful.” It was as much as she wanted to admit at that point. She could boldly fuck women at the hidden bar in town, with people who understood and knew it themselves, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to look her father in the eye and speak about it openly.
She made it only a few minutes down the road before she had to pull over. The relief and the guilt from the twist of love and fear across her father’s face had her in choked breaths and tears over the steering wheel. It shouldn’t have had to be that way. He shouldn’t have had to carry the weight of this thing she’d thought she had been bearing on her own for so long. The tenderness of it felt kind and genuine and merciful – the way he had, in action more than words, agreed to walk through this with her. People like her weren’t supposed to get that from family, from outside their community, from anyone not like them. It unfurled from deep knot in her stomach to something aching and bittersweet in her chest.
With the way she and Lupe looked and the way many in Moose Jaw had come to know Jess to be, she understood that Lupe staying – in the way Jess so wanted – would say something very specific to everyone around them. It would be undeniable, exposed in a way that felt far more threatening than when everyone knew, but didn’t necessarily acknowledge, Jess’s queerness. If Lupe stayed, everyone would know, if they didn’t already, that Jess was queer. Fine. They would know that Lupe was queer. That was more worrying and tightened something fierce and protective inside of Jess. They would know that Jess’s family raised and loved a queer. That scratched at a hidden fragment of shame deep inside her, the existence of which she so hated. It threatened to grow and gut her, turn her inside out, but instead she bent it to kindle her emotions flaring hot and singeing and defensive.
There would be no undoing it once it all came to light. Jess knew the power of acts with such finality. She learned the feeling of their weight in her hands at a young age, the life or death of them, the risk of suffering, the unknown chance of relief.
When Jess was seven years old, the McCreadys woke up to find someone had dumped a newborn foal on their property, in the lot by the barn that held their sheep overnight. The younger kids were excited, including Jess, but the older siblings were skeptical. They knew better than to believe someone would just give up an asset so valuable to farm life. Their father was experienced enough to have some idea why a person might, experienced enough to know that gift horses often had rotten, thorny, tangled things hidden in their mouths.
When he got close enough to judge its appearance, he quieted the kids and told them to pay attention. He needed them to understand that there was a right way and a wrong way to care for the wellbeing of animals. “See the foal’s pure white coat and blue eyes? Sometimes this happens, kids, a sad reality of nature. Foals born like this will soon get very, very sick in a way we can’t fix. They die in a lot of pain at just a couple days old.”
He paused to let that statement settle. His kids were very familiar with death – it was an inescapable part of raising and caring for animals – but he never wanted them to take the loss of life lightly. “Now, someone was too cowardly to do the right thing for this creature themself. The kindest thing we can do is prevent that horrific pain.”
He turned to his eldest son and said grimly, “Harry, go get my shotgun.”
Jess bit her upper lip to keep it from trembling. Immediately after seeing the foal, she had clambered over the fence to run her fingers through its furry newborn coat. As her father spoke, the foal had been lipping at and suckling on her fingers.
She was no stranger to death, but this tiny creature seemed so alive. And then her brother, closest to her age and standing across her on the other side of the small horse, said wistfully, “His eyes are like yours, Jessie.” They were the same bright blue, and as soon as he said it, she couldn’t not see a projection of all the hope and heaviness in her heart reflected in the horse’s eyes.
“You can’t, Papa,” she pleaded to her father, trying to keep herself from crying as tears threatened at the corners of her eyes. “Please, he’s okay. He’s not sick yet.”
“It’s just part of it, kid. It’s our responsibility to do right by them, even when it hurts our heart.” His voice was firm but gentle. Jess never knew his words and actions to be anything but.
“Can’t we just wait and see? What if he doesn’t get sick?” She wiped her eyes and steeled herself, choosing to try to be firmer than he was, while the roiling emotions inside her made her feel she couldn’t possibly be gentle.
Facing his kid’s stubborn resolve and boundless compassion, he sighed, supposing it might be a lesson best learned the hard way. “Okay. But you stay with him, and as soon as he starts biting at his flanks, come get me right away.”
Jess exhaled the plead she was holding so hard to and nodded. But the immediate relief was soon replaced by apprehension when she realized the responsibility to choose when and how this sweet creature would die was now in her own gentle hands. It was the first time her word alone had power to save or to ruin a life.
And as it turned out, in that instance, she saved, avoiding a nearly tragic but easy and honest mistake. Jess watched him vigilantly at all hours that first week, waiting for disaster and dreading the moment her word would take his life, but the foal stayed healthy and happy. He became a permanent member of the McCready family, and Jess named him Sunny and raised him from bottle to foot-perfect ranch horse.
It was an instance that both made her feel powerful in a slippery, intangible way and scared her to her bones. The same moment that emphasized her agency highlighted the fractal of unpredictability of known and unknown context and circumstance. At age seven, Jess became acutely aware of the way in which her choices were always bound to the will of everything unfurling around her. She made a decision with Sunny and simply got lucky. His wellness and livelihood should have made her feel heroic, but for years her head couldn’t stop spinning around risk of it all. The fact that her choices could only ever get them so far from danger haunted her endlessly.
She never minded putting herself in some degree of danger, but how could she jeopardize the safety of the people she loved? And just for greedy indulgence of her needy heart that wants more and more and more? Could it really be so hard to content herself with cold nights wrapped warm with Lupe and covert tenderness behind a smokescreen of platonic fondness and banter? She was pretty sure Lupe loved her. Everything behind closed doors told her that. Why must she risk it in bringing it to the surface, into the light where everyone could see and judge and scrutinize?
Lupe’s weight shifted then, and as she burrowed her face deeper into the crook of Jess’s neck, it brought Jess back to her body, back to that present moment in the middle of the night. And it seized her heart with a sharp pang of the endless wanting – wanting Lupe embedded within every part of her life, wanting to be known as Lupe’s, wanting a world in which they could love and be loved safely.
She held Lupe closer and breathed the soft sleep of her. Jess didn’t intend to wake her with the gentle motion, but Lupe’s eyes fluttered open.
“You’re still awake,” she murmured, voice coarse and heavy with sleep.
“Mhm.” Jess let her head fall to the side where she was nearly forehead to forehead with Lupe. It meant Lupe only had to stretch up a couple inches to press her lips to Jess’s.
“I’ll stay up with you.”
Jess could hear, though, that she was still walking the edge of barely awake. “No, no. Sleep. I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
Jess hummed, debating for a minute whether or not to answer honestly. “You.”
Even half-asleep, Lupe’s reaction still seemed like deflection. “You don’t need to think about me.”
Jess could have laughed – there was nothing she thought about more.
But before she could react, though, Lupe settled back into Jess and whispered against Jess’s skin, eyes closed again. “You don’t need to,” she repeated. “I’m good. This is good.”
Jess kissed the top of her head and felt her breath slowly begin to fall deeper and steadier. It wasn’t the resounding reassurance that Jess wanted to scrape at Lupe’s skin for, but the casual vulnerability in the blur of the night soothed her. It meant something – part of all the little tender gifts Lupe gave only to Jess. She was good, content in a way that allowed her to rest more easily and to exist more freely than Jess had ever seen from her before.
They laid together in the shadowy darkness, the features of the room just barely outlined by a bit of moonlight spilling through the window across from the bed. Nights awake felt liminal and otherworldly to Jess, with everything so still and cast in silvery blue. But Lupe’s limbs around her were grounding.
All of those nights, lying awake with thoughts dragging her back and forth across fear and love, she felt so lucky and disbelieving to get to hold Lupe, to have her in Jess’s space, to let her nestle into Jess’s life.
But each of those nights, Lupe had held Jess as well, in the same firm, steady, solid way.
She was deep in it with Jess, undeniably. And it really was, in Lupe’s sleepy simplification, good. Jess found herself washed in warmth and ease with the acknowledgement, and suddenly it felt not just possible but welcome and sating to let herself fall, settle into being held.
Jess wasn’t even aware that she had fallen asleep until she felt the bed shift as Lupe got up. She wrestled with the blurriness of deep sleep compounded by the thickness of the gray morning light. Slowly, she became aware of Lupe quietly getting dressed in the corner of the room.
It hit Jess all at once – the memory of their settled affection in the middle of the night, the heaviness in her bones from the hours of wakefulness beforehand, the care of Lupe attempting to silently slip out to start the day’s chores while letting Jess catch up on lost sleep. It was overwhelming, consuming, bubbling up in her throat to the point that it was right there on her tongue, and her sluggish consciousness left her loose and unguarded enough to not stop herself.
“Lu,” Jess murmured, still foggy with sleep, with a rub of her eyes with the back of her hand.
“Hm?” Lupe looked up from where she was pulling on thick wool socks.
Jess propped herself up on one elbow to meet her gaze directly. “Will you stay?”
“In bed?” Lupe laughed. “And make the very hungry sheep wait for their breakfast? I think I’d lose a finger.”
“No,” Jess said with a small shake of her head, and she sat fully upright to further pull herself from sleep. “No, will you stay here? In Moose Jaw. With me.”
That made Lupe stop getting dressed altogether. She stayed stock still for a long moment that made Jess’s heart pound loudly in her ears.
Lupe bit her lip, worrying at the other sock still in her hands, and looked away before answering. “You know, I’ve never gotten that before.” But her eyes flicked back to Jess’s before she continued. “Someone asking me to stick around.”
She sat down at the foot of Jess’s side of the bed, expression pinched and pensive. “It’s not something I’m used to. Staying, I mean.”
Jess tried not to let her face fall. It wasn’t an outright rejection, and Lupe hadn’t run yet. She held her tongue and her eyes on Lupe’s, waiting, letting Lupe turn the idea around and around in her head. Jess had waited long night after long night. She could hold these still and stretched seconds.
Lupe took a sharp, shaky breath. “But I want to. I want to know what that feels like.”
“Yeah?” Jess said, smiling.
“Yeah.” Lupe nodded, still looking a little uneasy and lost in thought. But then Jess got a small but genuine smile and a half laugh. “I don’t think there’s anywhere I’d rather be than here with you.”
Jess couldn’t help but kiss her, pulling her in by the collar of her filthy coat and wrapping her hand around the back of Lupe’s neck. As she pulled away, she teased with a smirk, “Good thing you’re staying, ‘cause this laundry’s on you – look what you’ve done to the bed.”
Lupe looked down to see where dirt from her coat had fallen into the sheets bunched between them. “Hey, that’s on you just as much as on me,” she said defensively but still jumping to her feet to avoid any further damage.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Jess said sarcastically, shaking her head and threatening to lob a pillow in Lupe’s direction. “Go feed the hungry sheep. I’ll be out in a minute.”
Lupe skittered out of the room, laughing, and once she was gone, Jess collapsed back onto her pillow. She took several deep breaths to try to regulate her nervous system after having gone through the array of strong emotions just moments after waking up. It was hard to try to calm herself, though, when everything inside her was sparking wildly.
She’s staying, she’s staying, she’s staying.
And Jess couldn’t help but laugh at herself, staring up at the ceiling, for how this moment that changed nothing in practice changed so much in her heart. Lupe was staying. She was in this with Jess. She wanted it in the same way Jess did.
Lupe’s confession that there was nowhere she’d rather be washed over Jess, warm and honeyed. It was as good as if she’d outright professed her love. Jess knew.
Jess would tell her, not that morning but sooner rather than later. That day they would stay wrapped in the comfort of knowing there would be more and more days to come. And Jess would hold the words in her cheek until they too sat too heavily on her tongue –
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.