Work Text:
Jules wakes up first.
A beam of light moves into her eyes, and she blinks awake slowly. She can feel the cheap mattress against her side–-so she’s not at home, in her own bed. She tries to remember where she is. An on-call room? No–- and the thing she’s clinging onto isn’t a pillow, or a blanket; it’s warm and soft and smells like– Yasuda.
She inhales sharply. She’s suddenly ten times much more awake than she was ten seconds ago. Mika is asleep next to her, sprawled out on her back, and Jules is somehow wedged in the small space between Mika and the wall, and she’s started to seriously intrude on the other woman’s space. One of her arms is curled against Mika’s chest. Her other arm, which she’d been sleeping on, rests at her collar bone. Her leg is tucked onto Mika’s thigh.
Jules’s heart rate starts to pick up.
They’d been up late studying. Last night. She’d been at it by herself, as she’d been for the past few weeks, but yesterday had felt particularly hopeless, with answer after answer proving to be wrong, according to her booklet. Jules has always been smart, but she’s never been great at taking tests. Probably a lingering side effect of her parents swearing up and down that what happened in the classroom doesn’t reflect on who she is as a person, and them never bothering to teach her how to properly study. She remembers, all too viscerally, how close she’d gotten to something like a panic attack last night, the creeping fear that she’d fail out and lose her job, that she wasn’t good enough, that what everyone had said about her was true and that she’d have to say goodbye to Seattle and Maxine and she’d have to go back to living with people who didn’t even bother vaccinating her until it was required by her college. But then Mika had appeared, and she’d given up a surgery to sit with Jules, and she’d made some dumb quip about the Yasuda Technique , and that had pulled Jules out of whatever spiral she’d been heading towards. They’d sat on the bed, cross legged and facing each other, until they’d shifted onto their sides, Mika reading from her cards and Jules squeezing her eyes shut trying to remember, until Mika had let the cards rest on her chest and Jules had let her eyes stay closed. And now…
She looks at Mika, still asleep, breathing quietly. It’s rare that Jules sees her so still. Normally the other woman is a firecracker full of energy, digging a little too deep or saying something not entirely appropriate and overall being the yang to balance out Jules’s yin. Jules has the sudden desire to map out Mika’s star chart, to see what the universe has to say about her. She’s probably an Aries.
There’s a loose strand of hair that slipped out of Mika’s ponytail, resting on her cheek. Unthinking, Jules reaches over and brushes it away for her. Then, as if being possessed by some stupid gay force outside of herself, she lets her fingers trace along the curve of Mika’s forehead, brushing along her temple and onto the rise of her cheekbone. It’s nice to see Mika like this. Relaxed. At ease.
She tilts her arm so she can read the time on her watch. 6:30. An hour and a half before this stupid ABSITE test. They still have some time before they have to go. Mika hadn’t seemed stressed out at all, fully confident and cocky as she’d quizzed Jules the night before. But she hadn’t been mean about it, either. No, she’d just let her aura of confidence expand so that Jules could almost feel it, too.
Jules should move away. Mika had helped her last night, in a way she really didn’t have to. She’d calmed her down enough to remind her that she’s worked hard at this, and that she knows the material. That doesn’t mean that Mika agreed to whatever weird half-awake staring Jules has been doing. But she can’t seem to make herself move. Mika is so warm, and even on this cheap hospital mattress, Jules feels more relaxed and at peace than any time she can remember.
She can feel something, stirring around in her chest. The moment when the idea you had about someone shifts, and new doors of opportunities begin to appear. Yasuda, snoring softly against the weight of Jules’s arm. Mika, grounding her, calming her. Yasuda, her friend, who has been there for her, laughing with her and sometimes at her and making her intern year a little more bearable. Mika, who is smart and rash and funny and who holds so much care and love for this world.
All right, time to be normal about this. She can go through whatever personal crisis this is after she finishes the exam. Jules rolls away slightly, pulling her limbs back into her own territory and out of Mika’s personal space. But Mika, in her sleep, protests, furrowing her eyebrows and letting out a groan and reaching, blindly, towards the warmth that is retreating away from her. The movement causes her to roll on her side, and now they’re no longer touching, but instead it’s something much worse: Mika’s face, only an inch away from hers, the soft puff of her breath hitting Jules’s skin and making her shiver. Then, because somehow the universe has decided that she’s not suffering enough, one of Mika’s legs pushes against her own, relentless until Jules lets their limbs tangle once again. Her face is so close to Jules’s now. Jules thinks about hyperventilating. She decides against it, because that would definitely lead to Mika waking up.
This is ridiculous. Jules is a grown woman. Yasuda is a coworker. This shouldn’t be making Jules feel so crazy. Maybe it’s because she hasn’t had sex in a while, not since she and Kwan called things off a few weeks ago. Maybe her body is just reacting to that. But no, she knows that’s not it. It's something deeper, and warmer, and a little scarier.
Mika’s eyelids flutter, and she lets out a small yawn. Jules goes still as she watches the other woman slowly wake up. Mika rolls away and stretches her arms, blessedly unaware of whatever compromising position she’d initiated in her sleep. “What time is it?” she mumbles, voice rough.
It shoots right to Jules’s heart.
“A little after six thirty. We still have time,” she says quietly.
Mika nods. Her eyes close again. “Wake me in an hour,” she says. She rolls again, now facing towards the hallway and away from Jules. “‘m cold,” she murmurs, then scoots backwards so her back is pressed against Jules’s front. Jules lets out a sigh. She reaches an arm around Mika and tugs her close, sharing her body heat. As a friend, of course. It’s just her way of saying thanks for the studying help the night before. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
She lets herself sit with that lie a little longer.