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“Should we have, I don’t know, reached out to Laura Lee?” Van asked at a seemingly random point in their drive toward Lottie’s supposed wellness center.
Even though time, lately, seemed to pass Taissa by too fast, and the closer they got to this ominous location everything felt more heightened, for a moment, life just slowed down for her. Suddenly, she was sixteen, and making a pact with Van that one of them would stay sober at a high school party to keep an eye on Laura Lee, their more innocent teammate and friend. Suddenly, they were all in the wilderness, Taissa standing over the body of Van, mangled by wolves she wasn’t awake to scare away, and the body of Laura Lee, burned by the explosion of a plane she wasn’t there to stop her from getting into.
Swallowing down the memories, Taissa shook her head.
“Nobody knows where she is, Van,” she said.
“No, I know,” Van replied. At sixteen, maybe, her eyes would have at least watered at the mere idea of so completely losing touch with the other girl. That day, in the car, only the white-knuckle grip of her hands on the steering wheel revealed how her own words saddened her. “I’m just saying maybe we should’ve tried, or something. Feels wrong to have a reunion without her,” Van added.
“So now it’s a reunion? I thought you were just dropping me off,” Taissa said, directing a small smirk toward the driver's seat. Van rolled her eyes and lightly shook her head, but Taissa had no issue reading the amusement radiating off her. Van’s hands on the wheel relaxed. “Besides,” Taissa continued, “If that girl’s managed to avoid our collective shit for this long, I say we should just let her be.”
“Oh, like you let me be?” Van threw back at her, and Taissa didn’t mind giving her a genuine laugh for it.
There were more words at the tip of Van’s tongue. She almost wanted to point out that Laura Lee wasn’t just a girl anymore, none of them had been for a long time. It didn’t even count as an excuse that they hadn’t seen her in about twenty-five years, because they hadn’t been just girls since their first winter out there. But that was nothing Taissa didn’t know already. Besides, Van could remember that same instinct to protect Laura Lee somehow. From threatening classmates who had too much to say about the girl’s naive appearance, to late-night strolls on their first nights in the woods because she was too scared to go pee on her own.
So, Van stayed quiet. She didn’t bring the subject up again. And, before too long, she was parking her car behind Shauna’s minivan.
It turned out that reunion was too far too small a word for what developed that day on the compound.
Misty looked a little too excited to see them all, Natalie was hard to recognize under all those soft purple clothes, and Shauna appeared angry for reasons mostly unknown to the others. When Taissa tried to exchange a knowing look with Van, she found the redhead woman looking like her knees would buckle at any moment. Lottie Matthews, in all her troubled but mesmerizing glory, was walking toward them.
The moment felt nothing short of cinematic. All five of them waiting in various degrees of shock, confusion, and intrigue, watching Lottie cross through the middle of the new kingdom she built for herself.
When Lottie was close enough to part her lips in order to welcome them, glass shattering nearby startled them and made them all turn their heads toward the source.
“Oh my-”
In case they had any doubts about the identity behind those crystal clear blue eyes, all of them would always recognize that voice.
Laura Lee stood still just a few feet away from them, eyes wide and lips parted in shock. She was the only other person in that place besides Lottie not dressed entirely in lavender colors, even if the cardigan she wore had a few details honoring the other woman’s preferred shade. Her blonde hair fell just past her shoulders, and time had sharpened her features, giving the same signs of age as the rest of them. Still, she was unmistakable.
She took her time looking at each of the women standing almost in line ahead of her before she finally looked down at her own hands hovering at her front, and then at the broken jars of fresh honey that she had dropped the second she saw them all together. As if it was a reasonable conclusion to the sentence she started seconds ago, she sighed, “Honey…”
“Yes?” Lottie replied on instinct. All heads immediately swiveled toward her, making her flinch and raise an open hand, “I mean…”
Saving her from the awkward moment and genuinely too impatient to enjoy it, Shauna blurted out, “Wait, wait. Laura Lee?”
“You’re here,” Van said, a little softer and taking a step closer to the blonde. She was smiling, a gesture that Laura Lee seemed perfectly eager to reciprocate, accentuating it with a small nod of her head.
“Well, someone failed to mention that small detail,” Taissa pointed out, turning toward Misty.
“Oh, I didn’t know!” Misty exclaimed and, in turn, moved toward Natalie to lightly swat her arm with a familiarity that took half the group by surprise. “You didn’t tell me!”
“Sorry?” Natalie protested, frowning, but still, like the others, walking closer so their circle got smaller and smaller. “It slipped my mind…”
Natalie and Laura Lee made eye contact then, just long enough to make Laura Lee blush and then both of them quickly looked away…
(“Ow! Ow, Natalie! Stop hitting me, it’s me!” Laura Lee had cried out, a few nights ago, when Natalie first arrived at the compound just to try to escape and then proceeded to blow up her own plans to interrupt a complex therapy session to swing a tree branch at the first person that got close to her.
“Who the fuck is that?!” Natalie shouted back at her. She got one more hit before allowing the other woman enough time to pull down her bear mask. Natalie looked from the mask, to Laura Lee’s face, to the purple clothes, to Lottie, and then back again. “Yeah… That tracks,” Natalie sighed, dropping her makeshift weapon at last.)
“Were you… hiding?” Lottie asked Laura Lee with a badly disguised playful smile.
“No!” Laura Lee protested too quickly to do anything but further incriminate herself. “I was… busy.”
A fleeting moment of silence passed as everyone looked at each other one more time, trying to connect the stray and increasingly strange pieces of the puzzle they were all a part of.
“I’m sorry, Laura Lee, did you join Lottie’s… cult?” Taissa asked.
“It’s not a cult,” Laura Lee pointed out, raising one hand and tilting her head. Every gesture and her tone revealed a practiced quality to it that suggested it was far from the first time she said those words. But then again, she had always been a natural at jumping to Lottie’s defense.
“And she’s quite more important than that,” Lottie added.
That made all the others look at her again. Specifically, they looked down at her hands, at her right hand’s fingers so casually twisting the gold ring on her left. A series of gasps started as the group looked at Laura Lee for confirmation. The blonde didn’t make anything too bold, just didn’t hide her left hand with its matching gold ring, or her nervous yet joyful smile.
“You’re married?!”
The whole group’s exclamation made more than a few heads turn toward them, even if the scene already had too much attention from onlookers.
Lottie sighed and tried to shepherd her friends to a more private location.
“Why don’t we go inside, hm? We’ll talk more comfortably there,” she said.
Distracted by the onslaught of recent information, the group followed her without complaint. Laura Lee was ushered away from her spot by someone dressed in purple intent on cleaning up the spilled honey. The blonde’s apologies were only interrupted by Van throwing an arm around her and pulling her in for a hug as they walked toward one of the many cabins of the compound side by side.
“Hi, Van,” Laura Lee said quietly, leaning more into her side to make the most of the embrace.
“Don’t ‘hi, Van’ me, little shit. It’s been twenty-five years,” Van told her, without easing her hold on her. “Did you get taller?”
A few steps ahead of them, Taissa and Shauna were whispering to each other.
“Did you know any of this?”
“Me? I came here because you told me, Tai,” Shauna said. “I’m basically just hoping the cops don’t find me here.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
And, leading the group, just a few paces behind Lottie and the dress billowing after her, Natalie and Misty were engaged in a similar conversation.
“I just forgot to mention her, okay?” Natalie hissed.
“Haven’t you been here for weeks?” Misty threw back at her.
“Haven’t you been spying on all of us?”
“You know I don’t use that word!”
Despite the arguing, and her own scoff, Natalie couldn’t fight her amused smirk, and when she just lightly shoved Misty’s shoulder, the blonde blushed just a little too easily.
It was… strange, for Lottie and Laura Lee to interact with each other under the confused, impressed, amused eyes of their friends. No word really made justice to it. Being back in each other’s orbit felt so natural, but their relationship had known so many different stages, and their current, and best one, had never experienced the scrutiny of old friends. They didn’t want to retreat back to the intense semi-religious dynamic of their wilderness days, but the only other option they knew was their high school years filled with blissful infatuation, obvious pining, and awkward laughter. It was safe to say that watching a middle-aged Laura Lee still blushing when Lottie brushed past her behind the desk of the not-a-cult’s reception was a surreal and highly entertaining scenario for their friends.
After convincing everyone not only to stay but to participate in some of the treatments offered in the camp, Laura Lee clapped her hands excitedly, making half of the women on the other side of the counter repress an eye roll as a reflex, half expecting her to start a prayer as if they were going play a soccer game like they used to do twenty-five years ago.
“Okay, well, I think that’s it for now!” Laura Lee said, offering one of the most genuine smiles any of them could possibly manage. “I’m going to be working at our little chapel across the camp, but you’re all absolutely welcome to stop by. It’s another form of therapy for some people, you know?”
“Tell me, Laura Lee,” Van said, “Who exactly do you have at the altar of the chapel though?”
It was a risky joke, considering the things they’d had to worship in the past just to survive. Shauna and Taissa tensed, Lottie and Natalie flinched. Only Van could pull off that joke… And she did. Her particular intonation, her bold smirk, and the way she eyed Lottie and Laura Lee and back again, really sold it. Moved them far away from the darkest memories and all the way back to a million years ago, teasing Laura Lee for invariably blushing whenever Lottie walked past her in the showers of their locker room at school.
“Okay… I’m… I’m gonna go, yeah. I think… Yes,” Laura Lee said, nodding a little more than it was necessary. But, then the illusion of teenage years softly faded away. Laura Lee reached out to hold one of Lottie’s hands. She smiled and said, “I’ll see you later?” And every move, every look, and every word so obviously displayed the comfort and ease of a lifetime together.
Lottie watched with an easy smile as Laura Lee walked away, and then her eyes drifted toward Van. With enough playfulness in her tone, she told her, “Don’t be mean.”
“It was a genuine question,” Van said, raising her open palms in surrender while some of the other women chuckled. “I bet this place makes for a sweet spot for a honeymoon.”
Before Lottie could reply, Natalie’s scoff and laugh made them all turn toward her.
“Please. Do you even know Lottie?” Natalie said with a sharp smirk and a nod toward the woman in question. “They probably honeymooned somewhere sunny, exotic, and stupidly expensive.”
“Oh, I can see that,” Taissa jumped to join in on the joke. “A very exclusive resort, a private beach, maybe a yacht…”
“But oh no! Did Laura Lee get sunburnt?” Shauna added, with impressive deadpan humor and a pout that had Lottie rolling her eyes and Natalie choking on her own laughter.
However, Misty gasped and leaned into the desk as if she could pry a confession out of Lottie. “That can be so romantic,” she said, ignoring a couple of questioning looks from the others.
“Did you help her with her sunscreen, Lot?” Van asked, wiggling her eyebrows. “Give her a little massage?”
“Okay, stop. Stop,” Lottie said.
She shook her head and raised a hand, but as her friends laughed wholeheartedly, in a way she had missed as if it were oxygen, she found it was a lost battle to try to keep her amusement at bay. The group settled a bit, relaxed. But Shauna had a small grimace on her face.
“I’m sorry, I’m just struggling to picture Laura Lee as… a sexual being,” Shauna winced, with the thoroughly uncomfortable tone of someone discussing a close relative’s sex life.
“Oh, don’t picture anything. She’s my wife,” Lottie said, and this time her joke got everyone laughing so much that Taissa had to swat Van’s arm because people were staring. It was Lottie’s cue to usher them out of the reception area and toward their chosen activities. “Can we move along now? We have a lot to do. And I am not discussing Laura Lee and I’s intimate life without her being present,” she said and then, right on time as they were parting ways, just loud enough to be heard and spark a new way of rowdy comments from the teenagers her friends used to be, she added under her breath, “I’m afraid you’d be too stunned and jealous.”
The rest of the day went by in a blur of confusion, frustration, occasional self-discovery, and a handful of unexpectedly entertaining encounters around the camp. Toward the end of the day, when everyone was preparing to enjoy their free time, as usual, Lottie and Laura Lee met in Lottie’s office. Sometimes they discussed the management of the center, sometimes Laura Lee just waited patiently while Lottie finished some paperwork. Occasionally, they simply got distracted with each other until they remembered it was far more comfortable to return to their private cabin. This time, however, they were deeply enjoying talking about their friends as if the last decades had passed in the blink of an eye.
“So she wanted to kill Bruce?” Laura Lee asked Lottie, sitting side by side on the couch of the office, and pouting a little at the idea of the little goat dying that day.
“No, she thought she had to kill the goat,” Lottie explained, holding back a smile.
“Hmm, makes sense.”
That made Lottie lose the fight and let a chuckle burst out of her. “Really?”
“More than the things Misty told me after she came out of the sensory deprivation tank,” Laura Lee explained.
She wore that particular smile that had driven Lottie crazy since they were still teenagers. Sweet, almost innocent, but with something so knowing about it, that made it almost impossible to know just how playful she was actually being.
“Right. Of course,” Lottie nodded with an easy smile on her lips.
Lottie inched a little closer to the other woman. She had an arm draped over the back of the couch, and then she brought her hand to Laura Lee’s head, to gently run her fingers through her blonde hair.
Laura Lee begrudgingly interrupted the easy silence between them to say, “You haven’t checked on Tai and Van though.”
Lottie took her time before replying. The sight in front of her was distracting enough. Laura Lee leaned her head into Lottie’s touch. She was looking at Lottie so tenderly, and Lottie was fascinated with the way Laura Lee’s eyes reflected back to her everything she felt. Not just the love they shared for each other, but for their friends. Lottie could see in those blue irises the complexities of what the day’s reunion meant after twenty-five years.
“I don’t seriously expect them to make actual improvement on their first day of therapy, darling. This was mostly a fun experiment,” Lottie confessed, for once opting for a more lighthearted approach to a conversation. “Plus, I understand the appeal of hiding for some private time with someone you love.”
Laura Lee attempted to roll her eyes, but it was unclear if she knew that almost every time she tried that with Lottie, she was also smiling so fondly at her. Lottie never missed that detail though. Or the way Laura Lee also moved closer and let one of her hands rest on Lottie's thighs.
“They haven’t seen each other in years , Lot,” Laura Lee pointed out. “We live together. We wake up together every day. You saw me for breakfast.”
This time Lottie didn’t even attempt to resist the easy laughter that bubbled out of her. Some days she still couldn’t believe that this was her life, that even after everything, she got to end up there, making a home with the love of her life in a place they built together to help other people. Hoping that her wife wouldn’t notice the knot in her throat and the emotion shining in her eyes, and knowing she would, Lottie leaned in.
“Mhm, and it’s never enough,” Lottie whispered, and then connected their lips in a slow kiss. She found Laura Lee eagerly reciprocating. Without hurry, without reluctance. Completely feasting on the delight of each other’s lips. It took great effort for Lottie to pull back just enough to whisper against Laura Lee’s mouth, “We should go check on them.”
“In a minute…” Laura Lee mumbled, restarting the kiss with an added passion that got an endeared chuckle from Lottie, which quickly turned into a hum of pleasure.
“Laura Lee…” Lottie sighed into the kiss, but gave herself the joy of a bite to her wife’s bottom lip before pulling away.
“Okay, okay. I’m going,” Laura Lee laughed softly. She pulled away, but her blush and the way she looked at Lottie made the other woman consider completely forgetting about their friends for the night. “Are you joining us?” Laura Lee asked, breaking Lottie out of her thoughts.
Lottie took a deep breath and forced herself to stand up from that beloved spot next to her wife. She looked around her office, a little dazed. Her restless hands brushed her clothes idly. After a moment though, she seemed to come back, focus on Laura Lee, and smile.
“I… need to finish some stuff here,” she finally said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
“Are you sure? Is everything alright?” Laura Lee asked her.
No matter how careful Laura Lee tried to be, it would have been impossible for Lottie not to notice the way her eyes drifted down to the bandage she was still wearing on one hand.
“Of course,” Lottie replied. Promised . Her tone even sounded surprisingly confident. “With all of you here? Everything is perfect.”
“Well, I just wanted us all to gather and talk about what we learned,” Natalie said while fiddling with a little radio in the middle of the room.
At first, Laura Lee stood to the side with the others, right next to Taissa, nodding along to Natalie’s words and sincerely smiling at the progress the other woman had made in just a couple of days in the center. However, she couldn’t avoid noticing a little movement to the side.
Laura Lee stifled a gasp when she watched Misty turn around and take a sip from a bottle Van passed her. But, when she looked at Taissa for support, the taller woman put a finger to her lips, and her eyes glowed with mirth. Undeterred, Laura Lee put her hands on her hips and whispered Van’s name. The redhead had to press a fist to her mouth to keep herself from laughing.
Natalie was still talking about ‘bullshit’ and ‘discovery’ but unfortunately, no one was paying much attention. Laura Lee tried to move to stop them, but Taissa blocked her way and shrugged. The bottle was already in Shauna’s hands. When Laura Lee managed to move around Taissa, it was Van’s turn to block her way, and soon Taissa’s arms were wrapped around her.
Laura Lee gasped as quietly as she could and then whispered, “That’s a foul!”
As if the four women’s failed attempt at hiding their laughter then wasn’t enough, Natalie’s speech was apparently over.
“Okay, so, who… wants to get started?” Natalie said, trailing off a little when she turned around and noticed Taissa physically restraining Laura Lee, Van in a defensive position, and Shauna and Misty holding back their laughs. “Shauna?”
“To be honest,” Shauna replied, as she awkwardly unveiled the bottle she had been hiding behind her back. “I’ve already kind of gotten started.”
“Where did that come from?” Natalie asked.
“From Van.”
“Oh, you narc,” the woman in question protested.
“And you let them get away with this?” Natalie asked next, waving a hand in Laura Lee’s direction.
The blonde gave a little scoff and said, “Does it look like I can stop them?”
But there was such amusement in her tone that it sparked a domino effect of laughter and, in a matter of minutes, even Laura Lee had yielded and helped them convince Natalie that it would be alright if all they did for that night was enjoy each other’s company. By the time Lottie arrived, they had already gotten comfortable with pillows and blankets on a circle on the floor. Lottie’s reluctance didn’t stand a chance against the smiles of their friends and Laura Lee’s earnest blue eyes.
Once all of them had accepted that after meeting again under the strangest circumstances this was what they were doing, hanging out for one night as if they were regular old friends, the rest was easy. Lottie offered them a variety of drinks to compete with Van’s half-empty bottle of tequila. Not only was almost everyone eager for a drink, but Natalie was determined to find out if Laura Lee was still a lightweight, twenty-five years later. And, with the right music, with her wife’s arms around her, and all their old friends cheering her on, Laura Lee had no problem in proving her right.
When they settled back into their comfortable circle on the ground, most of their walls were down. Shauna and Misty were talkative, Natalie looked more like herself than she had in a long time, and Van and Taissa were sitting even closer together than the married couple across from them. Lottie was loose and relaxed, but it was so much more genuine than the front she usually put up for crowds that flocked toward her. Laura Lee couldn’t stop looking at her. She also could hardly stop blushing, smiling, and asking too many questions.
“Misty, what’s up with that guy?” Natalie asked. “Is that your boyfriend?”
“Boyfriend?!” Laura Lee blurted out and pouted a little. “But I thought you two-”
Lottie wisely interrupted her and put a hand on her knee, but she had a knowing smile on her lips as the conversation unfolded.
A few increasingly confusing exchanges later, Laura Lee was once again exclaiming, “Kevyn Tan is a police officer? Doesn’t look like it.”
“Whatever,” Natalie rolled her eyes and laughed. “Enough about us, come on, I want to know how this happened,” she added, gesturing with her glass of water in Lottie and Laura Lee’s direction.
“Oh my God, yes. I thought Lottie was still in Switzerland,” Taissa said.
“I thought Laura Lee was… a religious missionary?” Van added.
“Um. No,” Laura Lee frowned.
It was Shauna’s turn to lean forward, more than tipsy already, and ask, “Okay, which one popped the big question? My money is on Lottie.”
“Because she’s taller,” Misty nodded solemnly.
Taissa laughed fondly and said, “It doesn’t work like that, Misty.”
“You are taller than Simone, aren’t you?”
“Shauna, can you not…”
Taissa’s effort to avoid Van’s eyes the second that her wife was mentioned only made it more obvious how badly she wanted to look at her. Mercifully, Laura Lee interrupted them.
“ I was ,” she said. “I asked Lottie to marry me, about two years after we were able to reconnect.”
Half of the group cooed at the confession combined with the way the two women looked at each other at that moment. Then Natalie clapped her hands and exclaimed, “I knew it! You owe me twenty bucks, Shipman.”
“It wasn’t a real bet, Natalie!”
“Okay, but how do you even reconnect?” Van said, making air quotes at the last word. “Both of you disappeared off the face of the Earth.”
Laura Lee opened her mouth to reply, but she hesitated. They all seemed to be avoiding difficult subjects, which included most of their shared past
A firm hand landed on Laura Lee’s knee and gave her a gentle squeeze. “You don’t have to share if you don’t want to,” Shauna said quietly. But it was that exact reassurance which inspired Laura Lee to start talking.
“It’s okay,” Laura Lee said quietly, squeezing Shauna’s hand with her own for a moment before letting go. She directed her eyes to the safest spot in the room, the attentive brown eyes of her wife, who knew her story as well as she did. “I guess we didn’t have very different fates, Lottie and I. My parents just picked a different place for me… They couldn’t deal with the person I became without… and I… I couldn’t deal with myself either. I think you would call the place a sanatorium. Owned by the church, run by nuns instead of actual doctors. The nuns, to be completely honest, they were pretty cruel, at first. But it became a home. It’s not the one I wanted but they made me feel like I was a part of a family again so, that’s what I became.”
Enough time had passed so that Laura Lee didn’t cry telling her story, but she had to admit it was pretty jarring to share that for the first time with her old friends. By then she had already heard at least the main highlights of the others’ lives. She learned about the breakups, the marriages, the stays in rehab, the children, but there was so much more in between that she wished they would share with her eventually. She was quite hopeful that this meant a first step into getting to know each other again.
For a moment, the others only nodded in sympathy, and gave a few understanding smiles. But the silence was abruptly broken by Misty.
“Wait, wait, wait. Do you mean you turned into a nun?!” she asked, and that sparked a commotion in the group as everyone suddenly leaned even closer and talked over themselves.
“An actual nun? Dressed like a fucking penguin?”
“Was that… normal? Is there an age limit?
“Is that only a Catholic thing or…”
“Wait, are you catholic? I get them all mixed up.”
“Holy shit, we owe Allie a bunch of money…”
While most of the women fought for a chance to get their words out, Lottie delicately covered her mouth to hide her laughter. Laura Lee giggled along with her at first, then tried to shush her friends so she could explain.
“Yes! Okay?” She said. “I joined the convent, yes. It was… a misguided decision, but I think maybe it was what I needed, at the time.”
“Hold on, doesn’t being a nun mean you can’t have sex?” Natalie asked, getting ahead of all the other questions the rest of the group might have.
Misty jumped in to say, “Oh! It’s called a vow of chastity.”
“Whatever. Lottie said you guys fuck like crazy.”
“Lottie!”
“I did not!” Lottie laughed and flinched away from Laura Lee swatting her arm. She tried to look much more serious when she looked from Natalie to Laura Lee and said, “I did not say such a thing.”
“Hm, she strongly alluded to it,” Taissa said, a little quieter.
“Not helping, Tai…”
“But you can quit, right?” Shauna intervened. “That’s totally a thing… Right?”
Again, there was a pause. More tension this time. It almost seemed like the group was holding its collective breath waiting for an answer. Lottie and Laura Lee avoided everyone’s eyes.
“Yes, sure. Yes… That’s…” Laura Lee awkwardly replied, playing with a loose thread on a pillow she was holding on her lap and staring very intently down at it. “Yes, that’s something you can do. That’s surely, um, a thing that’s possible to do.”
The silence stretched for just a little longer as the women in that room processed the fact that their friend very much did not learn how to lie in the past twenty-five years.
“Did you do it?” Van gasped and didn’t wait for an answer. “Oh my god, you didn’t !”
“Did you run away?!” Shauna asked.
“Lottie, did you kidnap her too?!”
Lottie flinched at Misty’s accusation, but there was still mirth in her tone when she said, “Excuse me?”
“Oh my God ,” Taissa said, while covering her face with the palm of a hand, maybe holding back laughter, maybe too stunned. “You’re a nun who married a woman and started a cult together.”
“It’s not a cult,” Laura Lee repeated, as solemnly as she could, considering the bizarre circumstances and her inebriated state.
“Lottie, what did you do to her?” Natalie asked with a teasing tone.
“I do not kiss and tell, Natalie,” Lottie replied. Raising her glass and smirking proudly.
Again, Laura Lee lightly hit her arm and exclaimed, “Lottie!”
“I’m sorry!” Lottie laughed warmly once more but then gestured for the group to settle down. Once she had all their attention, she explained, “Okay, so, this is what happened. When I got released from… Switzerland, I obviously came back. The very first thing that I did when I returned was look for her.” She made a brief pause to look to her left and meet Laura Lee’s eyes. “And when we met… Well, she admitted she didn’t really want to stay there, and personally, I had nowhere to go… We realized we could start again, from zero, just the two of us…”
“I love you,” Laura Lee said. Her eyes were sparkling with emotions and all the memories from a time long gone, a much younger Lottie Matthews showing up unannounced at the convent, a reckless escape in the middle of the night, and the feeling of having the whole world stretched out ahead of them just waiting for them to start their lives again, together. Instead of bursting out crying at the overwhelming feelings, she opted for leaning toward Lottie and bringing her in for a kiss, which her wife blissfully returned, much to the annoyance and teasing yells of their friends.
“I’m going to be sick…” Shauna mumbled, looking from the kiss down the bottle still on her lap.
“There has to be a legal penalty for this,” Misty whispered. She was trying to remember all cases she had studied as a citizen detective that involved runaway nuns but the drinks and the company made it a little difficult to focus and, if she was completely honest, she didn’t mind it at the moment.
The playful comments continued for a moment longer, but soon enough, Van was rising from her spot beside Taissa and moving toward the little radio beside their comfortable circle on the ground. “I love this song!” she announced, turning up the volume of the familiar melody, and the rest of the group, the team, the little family gathered in that room followed her lead easily.
It felt so natural, to get on their feet and start dancing along with their friends. Everything felt simple while they played the music loudly, passed the bottles around, and danced without the slightest attempts at grace or coordination. In just a few minutes, Misty caught sight of snow falling outside, and it was the just cherry on top of their cake. Once outside, everything felt a little better, a little more surreal, and oddly perfect.
There were questions lingering in the air. Starting from the very foundation of their relationship, they all wondered if it was right to call each other friends after so many years of silence, and yet they all knew that word was so small for what they all meant for one another. Some of their lives were in danger, and some of their sanity and well-being seemed to hang from a thread. There were holes in their stories, secrets kept from each other and from the world that they intended to take to the grave. But, above all, there was love. It was undomesticated, loyal but with too many teeth for its own good, but it was still the greatest love they had all experienced.
It was there, as Lottie and Laura Lee swayed slowly and out of beat, when Taissa and Van kissed beside the fire, and as Natalie twirled Misty around, when Lottie and Shauna hugged for no other reason than standing close enough for it, as all of them laughed at everything and nothing in particular.