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Thursday
Dream doesn’t know the first thing about fishing, and she feels something just shy of foolish standing there on her uncle’s little pier with a tackle box in one hand and two rods in the other.
The last time she’d been here, teetering on rickety old pine pilings sunken into the Appalachian mud, she couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. Her hair had still been naturally bleach-blonde and pin straight—cut into a sharp little bob by their next door neighbor back in Florida—and her skin hadn’t yet bloomed with freckles, unblemished by the harsh rays of the subtropical sun. Photos from those trips show a little girl shying away from the smallmouth bass her uncle had just caught and held proudly in hand; show her in the lake, beaming in her floaties with a smile that’s a bit too wide and gummy, like she hadn’t quite gotten the hang of it yet; show her red-eyed with her left foot wrapped in gauze after stepping on a splinter the size of her thumb. Every time she flips through the album, she can taste the algae in the air and smell the heat of the forest floor.
Much has changed since then. She’s grown up, put together a life for herself that she has a complicated relationship with, and found someone who loves her: unabashedly and wholly and maybe a little recklessly. Dream has spent these many days doing many things, but none of them have been fishing. She could have lived out the rest of her time on earth without ever thinking about this cabin in the mountains ever again. That is, if it weren’t for Georgia.
Georgia wholeheartedly embracing fishing as her new hobby had been completely unexpected, truth be told. From all their years of conversation, Dream knew that she wasn’t exactly the most outdoorsy person in the world, and hadn’t exactly spent her childhood romping through the mountains and noodling catfish. Her skin was just as pale outside of her clothing as it was underneath it and she burned easily in the sun. All signs pointed towards her favorite pastimes lying strictly inside of a building, and yet the moment she’d tried fishing on a random whim, she had taken to it like a moth to a flame.
The streams were just scratching the surface. In reality, Georgia had sunk hundreds or even thousands of hours of free time into standing in front of a body of water with a stick and a hook and…waiting.
Dream can easily admit that fishing just does not have the same sort of appeal to her as it does to her girlfriend. They don’t have to have the same interests, and they already have plenty in common, so it would be easy for her to tune out this newfound obsession entirely, but she would hang the stars for Georgia. The moment her mother had referenced a fishing cabin vacation from her childhood over dinner one night, and Dream saw her eyes light up, the decision had been made before she’d even been cognizant she was considering it.
They’d driven about eight hours—first up the coast, then a hard westward pivot as the roads began to climb and cling to the rocky hills—to get here, cliché road trip rituals all completed along the way. Photo-ops at border rest stops, greasy drive-through food, a hundred games of eye-spy and the license plate game, tuning in to random AM stations to poorly “sing” along to patchy Southern Baptist gospel songs they didn’t know. By the time they’d reached the cabin, tucked away on a quiet lakefront with no neighbors for miles, the sun was setting and Dream had been spared from fishing for a solid twelve hours.
But, here they are. It’s hot, the dregs of August boiling the air where it sits unmoving over the surface of the water. While she’d fussed over Georgia just fifteen minutes ago, covering her with enough sunscreen to suffocate, the heat is brutal enough that she’s already worried about how quickly she’ll sweat it off and be vulnerable to the light again.
“I’m glad you brought that umbrella thing,” she chimes in. Speak of the devil. “I thought it’d be less, like, awful up here, but it’s just as bad as Florida.”
“I think everything south of the Mason-Dixon line is just this bad late in the summer,” she watches as Georgia adjusts her ridiculous little khaki bucket hat. It’s adorable, as much as she’s loath to admit it. “The South is just soup this time of year.”
“And yet you brought me to a cabin in the middle of nowhere with very bad air-con, just to humor my new fishing addiction” she leans up and pecks Dream on the cheek for a fleeting moment, no warning.
God, she hates how easily this woman flusters her. You’d think after all these years, across the ocean to across the room, she’d have built up some sort of immunity to it, but every day still feels like the first with her. “My patience is unending, I know.”
She’s kissed with a fist instead when she’s lightly boxed in the arm, but it’s not nearly enough to hurt, so she just rolls her eyes in response. “Just give me my stuff. Please.”
Dream turns over the box and one of the rods, leaving her standing there a bit dumbly with the other. She hasn’t held one of these for the better part of twenty years, and this one is twice the size and also not Hello Kitty-themed.
“Fair warning, I wasn’t big on fishing the last time I tried it,” she makes sure to get this out of the way with now. “I know we came up here for a fishing trip, but don’t be, like, disappointed if I just want to read in a deck chair or something instead.”
The other woman doesn’t even turn over her shoulder or interrupt her attempts at opening one of the aforementioned chairs they’d found in the cabin. “Oh, I know. I came here for a fishing trip; you came here because you’re stupidly in love with me.”
She rolls her eyes to no one but herself. “You’re putting the worm or whatever you’re using on my hook, though. I am not touching that shit.”
Georgia snorts out a laugh. “Not surprising you’d make me do that. I mean, you faint at the sight of blood, so what can I expect?”
“Oh come on, that’s so not fair. That was one time!” She protests, managing to stop herself just in time from stomping her foot like a petulant child.
A gaze is thrown over her girlfriend’s shoulder, dark eyes and a smirk peering from beyond the baby pink sleeve of her t-shirt. “You’ll never live it down, and you know that.”
Dream scowls.
“And I brought crickets to use up here, not worms,” she adds, smug with the correction. “This isn’t a cartoon. This is fishing . But sure, I’ll set up your hook.”
And, to her credit, she does. Dream is given the mercy of not having to spear a live cricket with her own fingers, but she does have to watch it wriggle as she waits for Georgia to finish her own. It’s…well, it’s a bit macabre.
“You still remember how to cast, right?” The other asks as she settles into her chair, arching back with a natural, languid ease that she never seems aware that she has.
Her tone is uncertain. Sure, she remembers the mechanics of it (they’re so basic that it’s hard to forget), but as to how well she’ll perform? Who knows. “Uh, I think so?”
“Good,” is all she gets before Georgia flicks her wrist just-so and lets the line stream from her fishing rod, reel flying with the distance she manages to get. And it looked like she hadn’t even tried.
With the bar set so high, Dream has no doubt in her mind that whatever she does will be significantly worse, which almost takes the pressure off, funny enough. Their skill levels are so vastly different that they aren’t even comparable, and that means she can do just about anything and get away with it, so long as she doesn’t accidentally hook her own ear in the process. The cricket still jostles the end of her line, and her mouth sours.
She sits down herself, feeling the way her body sinks into the weathered fabric. They had once been a brilliant red, she can remember it herself, but years of exposure had left them sun-bleached and faded. The fibers were still holding strong though, and that’s all that mattered. They were the kind with built-in rubber cupholders in the arms, but age had cracked them beyond the point of safe capacity.
Not knowing how else to do this, Dream closes her eyes and throws out the line, praying it doesn’t just wind up in a tree or something ridiculous. She hears her reel click as it lets out slack, but not for long.
Georgia snickers beside her, and she opens her eyes. It’s maybe fifteen feet out.
“Well…you’re not exactly a natural-born fisher, are you?” The other jokes beside her, wry smile hanging so wonderfully on her lips.
She mumbles something uncouth that only causes Georgia to properly burst into laughter, but it quickly becomes the last thing spoken for quite some time. With the way she’s so focused on the lake, it feels wrong to interrupt her, so she spends the untracked minutes watching, instead.
The birds are different here. That’s not exactly a surprise, they’re three or four states away from home, but she hadn’t expected the texture of it all to be so foreign. Calls she recognizes overwhelmed by those she doesn’t, all weaving together into one calamitous song, ebbing and flowing with the wind and the gentle waves lapping on the shore.
The soil isn’t that fine, sandy mess she’d come to love; it’s gravel, thick red clay giving way in all its foreignness to outcroppings of limestone that made her feel like she was back home. It’s already sticking to her boots; thank god the floor coverings in her car are machine-washable.
In the distance, the foothills rise into peaks, smooth and rolling and coated in swaying forests of pine and oak, tinted blue. She’d been to the Rockies more recently, and their stark beauty wasn’t really comparable to the simmering, haunting view of the Appalachians. The very air felt old, here.
Time passes slowly and without much rush. The minutes amble into what feels like hours of birdwatching and taking in the breeze, and Dream is so entirely bored out of her mind that she just might go insane from it.
“Did you know that the Scottish Highlands used to be connected to these mountains?” She blurts out. She doesn’t admit it, but that strange fact had brought her some comfort when they were apart. They had shared earth, once. Sure, long before the world was what it is now, but the dirt they stood on was the same.
Georgia turns toward her, head tilted in a way that makes her chest kick with feeling. “What, like, ages ago?”
“Yeah,” she turns to look at where her squirming cricket sits atop the water. Not a bite. “Like during Pangea and stuff.”
“You know the weirdest things,” it sounds like a tease, but her letters form with fondness. “Always full of super fun facts.”
“That’s my strongest skill. Can’t fish for shit, but if you want to know obscure bar trivia? Oh, man, am I your girl.”
Georgia’s laugh is soft. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I need to know if- oh! Dream! You have something on your hook!”
She sits up, panicking. “W-what? I do?”
“Look at your bobber. You should be able to feel something pulling.”
She looks. She sees it. She feels nothing. Whatever it is must be fairly small, and she thinks that’s a mercy. “I-I just reel it in? I don’t have to do anything special or—”
“Nope, not at all. Just spin by spin.”
Dream follows instructions, winding in the line bit by bit. The closer it gets, the more she starts to see that she does, in fact, have a fish when she sees a fin break through the water. “Oh my god, I really have something! I thought it’d just be a stick or- or debris.”
When she hazards a glance to her left, she sees Georgia, crooked smile gracing her lovely face. Her eyes glimmer like light does off of a dragonfly’s wing, and she looks over the moon, even if she won’t say it. This was a good trip idea, after all.
Finally, something violently thrashing breaks the surface and Dream is very suddenly faced with a live—and absolutely livid—fish. She can’t really blame the thing, it has a hook through its lip. Impromptu piercing isn’t exactly high up on anyone’s list of desired experiences.
“Ah, just a bluegill,” Georgia chimes in, evaluating her catch. “You should just throw those back. We’re here for bass.”
Then, Dream remembers the biggest reason she really, truly doesn’t like fishing. She is suddenly five years old again and just a bit mortified.
“Wait, those have spines on them, don’t they? Bluegill?”
Her fishing partner hums in affirmation. “Yeah, watch your hands. They’re not too bad, but no one likes getting poked.”
She can tolerate a lot, she really can. Cuts, scrapes, broken bones, but puncture wounds have always flipped her out since a classmate stuck a pencil into her palm in the first grade (unprovoked, mind you). “I-I don’t want to touch it. I don’t think I can touch it, Georgia.”
She snorts. “‘Course you can. Don’t be silly.”
“I, like- this is why I never go fishing. It really freaks me out,” she breathes out, the pace of her words increasing. “God, why couldn’t I have just caught something normal?”
“Oh, just pull it off. You’ll be fine.”
When Dream goes to reevaluate the live animal at her feet, things have become worse; it’s started eating its way up the line. “Oh, god, please get it off, please get it off! I so can’t do this.”
She drops the head of the rod down and it starts to flop around on the boards. Why are its eyes so fucking beady?
“It’s a fish, Dream,” she doesn’t have the most pleased tone of voice. “I’ve seen you fillet them in our kitchen.”
“Yeah, but they’re not fucking alive! This is totally different!” Her lips twist up, unsure of what else to do that isn’t dry-heaving.
Georgia rolls her eyes, but that gentle look on her face from earlier hasn’t totally faded. She pins her fishing rod between her knees, knicked from the last time she shaved, and holds out her hand. “Just give it to me, Clara.”
Friday
They wake with sticky skin. The ancient window unit hums, rattles, but it isn’t quite enough, not in this weather. Dream can feel dampness clinging between her knees and in the dip of her spine, and she can feel it where her skin is pressed by Georgia’s. They wake up like this in Florida sometimes, too, when the HVAC system struggles as the temperatures pass one hundred and the air hangs heavy with the storm season. All the rational parts of Dream want to find it gross and pull away, but love makes you do ridiculous things, and that includes letting her legs tangle and stick to the woman she loves in the heat. It’s a tacit commitment they make, over and over every summer evening.
Hands lilt along her side, counting ribs and making stars from her freckles. They are seemingly aimless and absentminded in their movements, but Dream knows by now that the patterns being traced into her skin always have subtext, even when their author isn’t quite aware of it.
“Go ahead,” her voice is gravelled with sleep, low. She always wakes ravenous with thirst. “It’s okay.”
The movement stills, but the contact doesn’t stop, like Georgia can’t bear to be parted with her. In a sense, they both know she can’t bear it. Neither of them can, not really. “We don’t have to. It’s early. We have the rest of the weekend to ourselves, anyway.”
Dream rouses one of her hands and slips it backwards, gliding down the crest of the other’s hipbone. Georgia had shed her pajama pants at some point in the night, too hot, and left only a little twist of lace behind. Dream lets her blunted fingernails play with the fabric, a helpless habit that she won’t ever break. “And I have the rest of the weekend to sleep, love.”
She feels a hot, shaky exhale of breath against the back of her neck and recognizes the soft curve of Georgia’s mouth pressing to salted skin a moment later. “Like it when you call me that, y’know,” she murmurs. Dream can feel the shape of her words as they’re made.
“What, ‘love’?”
Georgia nods as she nips a bruise into the side of her throat, not particularly rushed. There’s no plan, even when a wandering hand slips beneath Dream’s camisole, tracing one of her twin scars past her waistband only to find nothing else in her way. She hums, pleased with that bare trust, and slides her hand further.
“I- I can call you that more, if you want me to,” her words catch in her throat and her eyes flutter shut. She chases the arch of Georgia’s back with her own. Dream always feels so small in moments like these.
“I want you to,” Georgia says, firm in her words and her actions, just like she knows Dream likes. They know each other well, after so long. “Love of mine.”
She doesn’t say I love you very often, but Dream doesn’t mind, not when they’re tangled up in these rough-hewn sheets that Georgia is quickly kicking away for them. There are other ways she tells her, and she knows them. She feels them. She hears them. She hears them always.
…
She makes Georgia breakfast as a silent thank you for taking her apart and putting her back together again. It’s in the middle of flipping an egg that her dazed mind finally realizes that she’d accidentally picked up a shirt that wasn’t hers from the pile they left on the floor. It’s a bit tight across her chest, and she looks down to see the flaking logo of some English football club. Definitely not hers. Thankfully, Georgia swims in the t-shirts she sleeps in, so the rest still hangs on her without being embarrassing despite their different proportions.
Georgia likes her eggs over-easy. Two on the plate, with salt, pepper, and chives on top if they have them. She likes her toast a little too burnt, to the point where she can almost crumble up parts of it to make breadcrumbs for her eggs. Dream has made them an uncountable number of times at this point. Hell, she’d known her exact order when she was still stuck in the winding, gridlocked streets of London. Making it is a reflexive act of quiet devotion at this point: a symbol of care.
She likes when the edges are a bit crispy. Even if Georgia has never told her as much, she knows.
Dream hums to herself as she waits over the sizzling cast iron, losing herself to an amorphous pop song they heard on the drive up here. The stove hisses as it feeds on the canister of propane they’d brought, and it feels like she’s back home for a fleeting moment. Almost, if not for the fact there isn’t travertine beneath her bare feet, but rough wooden planks instead. A few curls have fallen loose from the hastily-tied ponytail she’d done as she got out of their bed and they tickle the back of her neck.
“Even out here in the middle of nowhere, I have my own personal chef,” Georgia laughs, high and clear like bells. It’s one of Dream’s favorite sounds on earth. “I’ll leave you the best Google review.”
She smiles as hands encircle her waist and she feels a soft weight press against her back. They’re both still running hot from earlier, but they’re drunk on the heady ecstacy of it. “You’d better give me five stars and three glowing paragraphs or I’m spitting in your eggs.”
Georgia gasps, but doesn’t let go. “Oh! I’ve downgraded you to four stars!”
“Seriously?” She snorts. “That only costs me one star?”
She makes a noise, struggling to suppress her laughter. “I mean, I’m open-minded about your kinks. If that’s something you’re into, you just have to ask, baby. It’s not a big—”
“Oh my god, please stop talking. I am begging you.”
“Well, you weren’t saying that half an hour ago, now were you?”
She prods the contents of the pan with an old plastic spatula. Her eggs are almost done. Dream’s cheeks are red. “Do- do you want your eggs or not?”
A kiss is pressed to a spot on her neck that Georgia had undoubtedly bruised earlier. It’s an apology of sorts that she employs often, usually when her teasing has pushed a hair too much. “I want you in my clothes, with a side of eggs.”
She rolls her eyes, unseen but undoubtedly known. “Just go sit at the table before I burn your breakfast, for god’s sake.”
…
The boat shed is a bit scary, if she’s honest. Time and a lack of visitation had not been kind to it, and it stands buried in mounds of leaves that had been blown in by the autumn gales as cooler storms broke over the mountains last year. The wood had seen better days, spared from neither termite damage nor wet-rot where it touched the soil. The shingles on the roof are crumbling, and then there are the cobwebs. They’re thick, orb weavers leaving behind dozens of attempts, layered one on top of the other only to abandon them to catch dew.
“There are far too many spiders in this country for my taste,” Georgia declares, her lip wrinkled in disgust as they stand side-by-side, evaluating the shed from a safe distance. “Don’t tell me they have those big ones up here, too.”
Dream shoots her a sparing glance, and it’s not a good one.
“Oh, come on .”
“I have some bad news.”
Georgia groans, slumping against her for dramatic effect. “You’re the resident spider killer back home, anyway. Can’t you just, like, go in there yourself? Why am I even here?”
“To stare at my beautiful face and admire my back muscles in this tank top when I haul the boat out.”
“You know that’s one of my weak points, and I don’t appreciate you using it against me like this.”
She huffs out a sound, contented that the jab had landed exactly as intended. “Well, hey, maybe you’ll finally get over your fear of spiders. I mean, it can’t be that bad.”
Georgia shoots her a look that screams it can absolutely be that bad and crosses her arms over her chest. “You owe me, like, a thousand dollars when we get home. Take me to a spa or some girly shit.”
“Deal,” she replies with no hesitation. Getting day-drunk while having expensive goop smeared on her face in a meticulously air-conditioned building sounds exactly like her idea of a good time.
Dream approaches the shed with a stick she’d broken off of a pine tree on the way down here. It’s a good few feet long, and that should be enough clearance to handle the spider webs, right? She starts sweeping, making sure there aren’t any brown recluses sitting proudly on the silk, just to clear enough space to get to the doors.
“You look so stupid right now,” Georgia snickers. “Waving a stick around at stuff I can barely see from back here.”
“Do I need to remind you who is the reason we’re out here in the first place?” A spider she’d missed starts to crawl up the stick toward her at an alarming speed and she flings the entire branch away with a yelp so embarrassing that she almost refuses to acknowledge it’d come straight from her parted lips. You know what? She’s knocked enough of them down for safe passage.
The other woman finally graces her with her presence by the door, face twisted in that typical Georgian judgement. “I’m not even gonna ask about whatever that was.”
“And I wouldn’t answer. Anyway!” She claps to put a point on it. “My uncle said he wound up selling the one with the motor a little while back, so all that should be in there is the rowboat. We won’t be able to go as far, but we can at least get out.”
She nods, quiet for a moment in a way that catches her attention. “There’s good enough fishing from the dock, you know. We don’t have to go out if this is, like, a whole production. There could be other non-spider shit in there.”
Dream recognizes that there’s genuine consideration in her tone, and turns to face her. “I don’t mind, really.” I’d do just about anything for you, and you know that. “If nothing else, I don’t really have to worry about the financial burden of antivenom or rabies shots, so there’s that.”
“Jesus, Dream,” the other murmurs, gaze uncomfortably shifting to the shed. “I know that was meant to be a joke, but I’m not gonna laugh at that one.”
“Look, it’ll be totally fine,” she reassures. “We live with fucking alligators back home. Even if there is something in there, I can handle it. I promise.”
Georgia’s expression is skeptical, fingers nervously fiddling with the hem of her cargo shorts. “Let’s just- let’s get it over with.”
She swallows thickly, past the lump in her throat, and steps forward to wrap her fingers around the rusting handle. “Ready?” She calls back.
A hesitant sound of affirmation comes, and she starts to count down. “Three,” her grip tightens on the flaking metal. “Two,” she sets her back foot more firmly in case she needs to run. “ One .”
She flings the door open with a bit too much force, smacking it against the wall and causing it to bounce back toward her, which she manages to catch before it hits her.
“So far, so good?” Georgia proferrs, from her safe spot five feet behind her.
“Yeah…” She steps forward into the threshold, digging for her phone to illuminate the dark recesses of the outbuilding. She has to fumble for a moment before the tiny LED manages to switch on.
She can see the boat, upside down on the floor, and the oars hung on the wall beside it. It’s also dusty and covered in cobwebs, but it’s fared a little bit better than outside, at least. The rest of the shed is filled with bits and bobs: tools, empty propane tanks, leaking cans of wood stain, nets. If there were a light in here, it probably wouldn’t be remotely creepy, just neglected.
“You’re really not going to help me with the boat?” She asks again as she formally steps inside, having to duck to make it under the doorway.
Before Georgia can even answer, several things happen very quickly. A dark shape, spooked by her entry, darts out from behind the boat and sprints full-tilt at the door, which she is not so helpfully standing in front of. The more instinct-driven part of her brain reacts first, long before the rational one can catch up, and she screams the sort of girly, embarrassing scream you see in bad horror movies. Georgia sees the animal the second she does and can’t help but shriek too, bolting toward the lake before it can get anywhere near her. It’s gone in a flash, scampering up the crocodile-skin trunk of a longleaf pine just outside before she can even blink, and it’s only then that she can’t help but burst out giggling.
“Georgia!” She yells. “It’s- it was a fucking chipmunk !”
“Wh-what?” She can hear her, hesitant and easily twenty feet away.
“We just screamed over a fucking chipmunk,” she can hardly get it out between gulps of air as tears prick in her eyes.
It finally hits her. “Like Alvin?”
That only makes her laugh harder, and Georgia finally joins in, the sheer ridiculousness of the situation getting to her, too. They laugh, faces red and cheeks aching, like it’s the only thing in the world worth doing and, in a sense, it is.
Saturday
“Can I ask you something?”
The water ripples softly where it cradles Georgia’s bobber on the surface. Water striders dart by every few seconds, hardly disturbing the reflection of the boundlessly blue sky above. It seems bluer here than it does back home, truth be told. Deeper.
“You can always ask me something,” Georgia drawls, the gaze beneath the brim of her hat fixed on the water. She’s beautiful when she’s focused like this, Dream finds.
“What is it about this that you like?” She puzzles. “You can zone out while doing anything, and you don’t usually bring the fish home to eat, anyway. Why go through all this? Buy the equipment, wait the hours. It isn’t something I’d ever have you pegged for.”
Her girlfriend finally pulls her eyes from her line and tilts her head down to look at her instead. Despite the umbrella and the hat, the sun still hits her irises, dying them a warm burnt umber with flecks of ochre in a way that still steals her breath away. Georgia’s always a little avoidant when it comes to eye contact with everyone, so Dream forgets just how intense her direct gaze is until she’s given the privilege of being its subject.
The left corner of her lip pulls in as she thinks for a moment. She takes her time. Maybe it’s a side effect of this environment, bogged down with the sluggish pace of life in the August heat, or maybe it’s a question she’s never thought to answer before. “Remember two months ago?” She asks, pulling her heavy gaze from Dream and returning it to the water before them.
She thinks. “When Patches sprained her tail?”
Georgia chuckles, adjusting the tension in her line. “No, sweetheart. Remember what you did two months ago?”
She has to mull it over. Without the traditional weekly structure of school or a normal nine-to-five, Dream oftentimes finds herself drifting through time, unaware of the days as they slip by her, amorphous and unending. Georgia used to poke at her about having her head stuck in the clouds, but had stopped last year after a particularly guilty incident of forgetting they’d had dinner reservations for what must have been the third or fourth time. Dream had burst into tears the moment Georgia walked into her bedroom, dressed up and beautiful and smelling of her favorite cologne, and she knew that it wasn’t a teasable topic anymore.
But, she thinks. “I was editing,” she finally proffers, shuddering to think of the state she’d been in for most of the entire month, a particularly productive editing spree consuming her. The only times she ever ate for days on end were when Georgia unplugged her computer and forced her to acknowledge the plate she’d set down in front of her. And even then, she’d first scramble to reconnect the plug with the socket.
Georgia’s reel clicks as she lets out line, a pleasant ticking sound that she’d come to enjoy in the unending hours of sitting here with her this week. “What goes through your mind when you’re editing?”
“Not much,” she admits as she swings her legs out like a child over the side of the peer. Back and forth in her characteristic restless motion. “You know how completely absorbed I get in what I’m doing.”
“Fishing’s like that for me,” the brunette continues. “You know I get easily overwhelmed a lot of the time. I’m not…I’m not great with handling things. Not as good as you or Nicole are, at least. I feel too much too often, or I just get stuck on something and can’t let go, even if it means I’ll spin out. When I’m doing this, even if I don’t catch anything or keep anything I do manage to reel in, it’s like my head just goes quiet.” Her tone is tremulous and delicate, such a departure from her usual coy mischief. It’s a rare thing for her, and Dream knows she has to treat it as gently as it deserves.
“So it’s, like, meditative for you,” she supplies, hoping for that last piece of clarity.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Georgia agrees. “Which sounds kind of stupid, now that you say it out loud, but I don’t know what else to call it. I just want my mind to stop, sometimes.”
And Dream understands that. The incessant march of her own thoughts is bad enough some days that all she can do is dig the heels of her hands into her skull is some vain attempt for it all to go quiet. It never works, of course, but it’s better than any other more reckless alternative which would only leave her understimulated and frustrated.
Cicadas drone in the background. It’s too early in the day for the treefrogs to join in, the sun too high in the sky for them to emerge from their hidden cavities in the trees where the morning dew collects, sparing it—just for now—from rejoining the humid air.
“You can always come to me, Georgia,” she murmurs. “If it feels like too much to hold, I can hold it with you. I’d put the world on my shoulders for you, you know.”
She smiles, one of those soft little things she reserves just for people she loves, far away from the prying eyes of a camera. “You’d be Atlas.”
“I’d be Atlas,” she affirms before reaching up to play with the little tufts of hair at the nape of Georgia’s neck that stick out from the bottom of her hat: fine and soft in her fingers. The other woman’s head subconsciously leans into her touch, like they’re magnetically tied to each other, skin chasing blood chasing bone.
She doesn’t acknowledge Dream’s offer beyond that, and she can’t say she’s surprised. It had taken a long few years, in that time when they still had an ocean between them, for her to understand that Dream was a safe place to be, for her to let go of that hesitancy and protective instinct that plagued her so ruthlessly. They’re still both getting used to the idea of being fully attuned with one another, and making sure Georgia knows is all she can ask for. They can be gentle with each other when they want to be.
She isn’t sure how long they sit in the Appalachian version of quiet after that, Georgia watching the water and Dream watching her. A symphony of insects rises and falls in the background, and painted turtles pop up for breath every now and then, their heads hardly disturbing the surface of the lake when they break it. Squirrels chatter in the trees nearby. Rocks as old as bone and mornings smoky with a blue fog that echoes when the entire region laid beneath an ocean: it’s the sort of place made for drowning out the rest of the world, and it makes sense why her uncle bought this tiny little cabin to have a slice of it to himself all those years ago.
“I love you, you know,” Georgia says, suddenly. “I know I don’t really tell you much, but I—”
“I know,” Dream interrupts, stopping the train on her tongue before she can run away with it. She has to look up to where Georgia sits in her chair to meet her eyes, soft and forgiving, “I hear it, even if you don’t say it out loud.”
She watches as Georgia carefully sets her rod next to her before leaning down to catch Dream’s mouth in a pacific kiss. It only lasts a few seconds, and it’s chaste, but she knows what it means.
She can’t help it when she breaks out in a grin that makes Georgia roll her eyes. “See?"
…
Georgia has her head in her hands and reflexively whines when Dream’s own hand, wet with aloe vera, touches her upper back. “God, be gentle.”
“I am,” she reassures. “Your skin’s just sensitive. I’m trying.”
She sighs, but Dream can tell from the way she slumps forward, bare chest settling on the scratched laminate of the kitchen table, that she’s resigning herself to it.
Dream had gone in to take a nap, worn from the sun, and came back out two hours later to the sight of Georgia completely unmoved from her previous spot. But, now she was in just her bra, skin reddening under the golden rays that had slipped past the umbrella as they shifted with the march of the day. She remained entirely unaware, too focused on the trout she was reeling in to notice. I was hot was her excuse.
It’s far from the worst sunburn she’s ever seen. She’ll have some nasty tan lines in a week that Nicole will tease her about when they get back home, but the rest should heal without much blistering. “You’re honestly lucky you didn’t get sun poisoning. The UV index is eleven today.”
“And it’s eight million degrees outside. I couldn’t bear wearing that thick t-shirt for another minute. You would’ve come out just in time to see me dramatically faint from heat stroke,” she complains, shifting slightly under Dream’s touch. It’s a little hypnotic to watch the way muscle and sinew move and stretch beneath her.
With an almost trembling touch, Dream makes contact with her back again, starting high on her neck, right where the soft curls of hair end. “Have I told you that I love how you’re keeping your hair these days?”
“A thousand times, yeah, but I’ll happily hear it again,” Georgia hums, pleased with herself.
“Well, I love it short,” she continues. “It suits you.” A part of her wants to cut off her own tangled mop of curls, too: to join her in feeling the wind on the nape of her neck. She’s never worn it that short before, but there’s one person who can change her mind just like that.
Georgia hisses as light hands start to move lower, spreading cool gel over blanched skin. “C-careful!”
“I’m sorry, baby,” is all she can say.
It’s intimate, this. Not in the way that makes her want to reach down and put the slickness of her fingers to use, but something more tender, shaped like rapture. Georgia is baring more than just her upper body to her, and she takes this act of trust for what it is. She’s the only one who gets to see her like this, who gets to feel her like this; it’s a privilege, and she’s not blind to it. Her lover is asking for relief and she is helpless to provide.
She takes her time, even though she can feel Georgia start to get impatient underneath her. She begins to fidget when she does—such a typical tell of hers—and looks over her shoulder to watch Dream in her ministrations. “How much longer?”
“Does the aloe vera feel good?” Choosing not to engage with Georgia’s dissatisfaction can have mixed results, but it’s not like the other girl can go anywhere, no matter her frustrations.
She groans, frustrated, but still answers. “I guess, yeah. Still hurts, though.”
“I’m sorry,” Dream says, and she means it. “I hate making you hurt more, but you’ll be absolutely miserable later if I don’t. Trust me.”
“I’ve never gotten a bad sunburn before,” Georgia blurts out, then recoils like she hadn’t meant to do. “Like, I’ve had some light ones on vacations and stuff, but I think this is the worst one I’ve ever gotten.”
It’s strange how Dream finds that endearing, almost sweet. They’d taken so many years to find each other, and there’s always some nagging part of her that worries there aren’t all that many firsts left to experience, that life has been used up in the twenty-seven years she had missed with Georgia. She knows that it’s a sort of silly thing to get so stuck on, but she can’t help the way she thinks. Every day before the one where Georgia had been brave, had crawled under her covers one night and refused to leave until she said what she’d needed to, feels like a gaping wound.
This is a small first, but a quiet warmth blooms in her chest nonetheless at knowing that Georgia experienced it with her.
“Good thing I’m here to help, then.”
“You’ll have to be like Atlas now, whether you like it or not, ‘cause I think my shoulders are so burnt that I can’t hold the world anymore.”
She smiles: an achingly fond thing that she gets to keep to herself. She knows Georgia would tease her for it, for being so weak to her, for relishing that she gets to take care of her.
They sit in the quiet for a long time. Dream loses track of the minutes, only keeping time by the hitches in Georgia’s breath when she hits a particularly sensitive spot and her dulcet sighs of relief when a particularly bad area is no longer exposed to the air. There is no more need for words between them, because Dream’s hands and Georgia’s refusal to move are messages in and of themselves.
By the time she’s done, the sun has fallen low in the sky, hailing the inevitable end of their last day in the mountains. A part of her doesn’t want to go back home. No, that part of her wants to keep Georgia all to herself in this little cabin in the middle of nowhere, wants to be held in the morning light and dance after dinner without the world breathing down their necks. There is an amnesty here, and she doesn’t want to let it go.
“You should just go lie down on the bed and let this keep drying,” she suggests, finally drawing away from Georgia’s body and standing to wash her hands. “I can make dinner for you.”
The brunette stretches, tender flesh pulling tight. “Mm, I can just stay here. Distract you with my beautiful self while you cook.”
She can’t help but laugh because it’s true. Georgia’s a consummate distraction. She’d happily live out the rest of her days distracted, but she can’t exactly say that outright. Not yet, at least. But someday. Someday, she’ll tell her that this is it for her, that she’ll never want for anything else ever again.
She reaches out to cup Georgia’s face, thumb trailing along her jaw and tilting her head up so their eyes meet. “I don’t mind.”
When they kiss, it’s slow and unhurried, like the world is outside of their windows. Maybe, when they leave, they’ll carry it with them. Maybe their touches will be less frantic, less like they’re making up for lost time, terrified of being pulled apart by distance and time. It would be nice, she thinks, to just savor the strawberry chapstick on her love’s lips.
Sunday
Her uncle had left behind a checklist to follow as they closed up the cabin: disconnect the gas and the generator, bolt down the shutters, tie up loose rope on the dock, stow away the boat, put the keys back under the real rock he hid them beneath, et cetera. His handwriting was difficult to read, chicken scratch barely legible in its jagged loops, but by the time everything is said and done, Dream is pretty sure she’s hit every point and left the cabin properly sealed up for its next visitor.
She doesn’t want to leave. The real world—all of its obligations and slanders and exhaustion and endless phone notifications—awaits them, tapping its foot in impatience. But, the longer they take to pack up, the more tired it gets of waiting on them.
About five minutes ago, she’d opened up the car windows and started up the AC in a bid to dampen the oppressive box of heat it had become in the time it laid fallow. Each day of their trip, it had been in the mid-nineties, and the car was just as much a victim of the heat as they were. Georgia happily sits on the porch in the meantime, picking at her sunburn as it peels from her forearms. Dream’s scolded her for that, of course, told her it’s not healthy for her skin, but she understands the compulsion of it. They’re alike in the little ways, too.
“Come on, I got all the luggage in, and the car should be a bit cooler now.”
She takes one last look at the lake, peeking through the trees. Its surface glimmers in the midday sun, every ripple creating riotous swathes of sparkling peaks that shine almost unbearably bright. She’s used to that with the ocean, but the softer, finer currents of a small body of water like this magnify it tenfold. It’s strange to see this place in two lights, now. For so long, it was frozen in her childish memory, so unused to the world and all of its wonders that every unfamiliar blade of grass had captivated her, enraptured. But now she’s older. She’s more tired, more weary of the world, but through the lens of her love for Georgia, through the lens of her devotion, she’s found herself still capable of finding wonder in those small things, even after all these years. There’s something precious in that, she thinks.
“We should come back before winter hits,” Georgia declares as she climbs in. “I like taking trips with you.” When she reaches for her seatbelt, the air conditioning on full blast makes her hair, despite how short it is, flutter.
She doesn’t hate the idea. She especially doesn’t hate seeing how Georgia looked when she was truly at peace somewhere. “Yeah. This has been nice.”
“Maybe I’ll actually get you to enjoy fishing next time.”
Dream spares her a look, even as she grabs for the hand Georgia had not-so surreptitiously left on the console between them. “Don’t push your luck.”