Chapter Text
“This is ridiculous,” Sloane grumbles, spitting out an errant strand of Hurley’s hair that’s found its way into her mouth.
“What’s ridiculous is that you’re a grown woman who’s been sleeping in her car for the last year!” Hurley quips. She’d never considered her bed to be particularly small, but then again she’d never had to entertain an overnight visitor who was twice her height and, if Sloane’s elbows jabbing into her back were any indication, constructed entirely out of coat hangers.
“What’s ridiculous is you are an upstanding law enforcement official who doesn’t own a couch like a sane person.” Sloane shifts again for the umpteenth time, trying and failing to keep her butt, feet, and knees from hanging over their respective areas of Hurley’s economical little bed.
“I said I’d sleep on the floor,” Hurley responds, voice gruff and quiet. She hunkers further into her space, a tightly wound divot that Sloane’s attempted to wind herself around without ever actually touching her partner.
“You have a bed you might as well enjoy it,” Sloane can’t keep the bite out of her voice. How nice to have a respectable job with a paycheck that affords you beds, it says. She’s already wincing at the way Hurley stiffens.
“I just…I worry…” The words are soft where Hurley isn’t. It’s a strained kind of tenderness, tentative buds reaching through years of cracked dry silt, waiting to be trod on.
Sloane doesn’t respond right away. Instead she swallows, sniffs, cracks a bone in her jaw. Moments like these are rife with things she could say. Words of understanding, words of affection that feel like pebbles in her mouth - foreign, weighty, uncomfortable.
So she doesn’t say anything, but tucks herself tighter around Hurley, legs wrapping around her feet, warming them. Sloane’s chest flushes up against her back, and the shudder that results might be a sigh. Might be a sob. Might be a fault in the springs.
One arm snakes under her head,a bony pillow, while the other settles across Hurley’s own, clutched against her middle. Together they form a knot of limbs and breath in the grain of her apartment. Little by little they relax, muscles loosening, eyes drooping.
Together they inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.