Archive of Our Own ^beta

House Hunting

The cul-de-sac was quiet in the way that suggested money. Not ostentatious money, not gated-community-with-a-guard-booth money, but the comfortable, unassuming kind that allowed people to pay extra for the privilege of not hearing their neighbors argue about recycling bins. Carol noted the absence of cars parked on the street, the uniform width of the driveways, the strategic placement of desert landscaping that said we care about water conservation while also saying we can afford the HOA fines if we don't.

Helen had already unbuckled her seatbelt before Carol had fully stopped the car.

"Look at that view," Helen said, one hand on the door handle, the other gesturing toward the Sandia Mountains rising purple-grey against the September sky. "You can see the whole city from up here."

"You can see the whole city from a helicopter too. Doesn't mean I want to live in one."

Helen ignored this, which was her standard operating procedure when Carol was being deliberately difficult. She was out of the car and walking toward the house before Carol had even turned off the engine, her stride carrying that particular buoyancy that meant she'd already made up her mind about something and was simply waiting for reality to catch up.

Carol watched her for a moment through the windshield. Helen's dark hair caught the afternoon light, and she was wearing the blue denim jacket Carol had bought her three years ago, the one with the slightly frayed cuffs that Helen refused to replace because she claimed it was "finally broken in." She looked happy. She looked like someone standing at the threshold of a future she could actually see.

Carol looked at the house.

Two stories. Southwestern-style. Soft beige stucco that probably cost a fortune to maintain. Solar panels on the side porch, which suggested either environmental consciousness or a previous owner who'd been seduced by a tax credit. The architecture had that particular New Mexico quality of trying to seem ancient and timeless while clearly having been built sometime in the last twenty years.

We're fine in the apartment, Carol thought. The apartment is fine. The apartment doesn't require a lawn mower or property taxes or conversations with neighbors about whose dog keeps digging up the petunias.

But Helen was already at the front door, and there was a man in a grey suit waiting to greet her, and Carol's feet were moving before her brain had fully authorized the action.

Mark Alvarez had the handshake of someone who'd practiced it. Firm enough to convey competence, brief enough to avoid discomfort, accompanied by eye contact that was warm without being invasive. Carol distrusted him immediately.

"Mrs. Umstead, Mrs. Sturka, welcome." He stepped aside to let them enter. "I'm so glad you could make it out today. This property just came on the market last week, and I have to tell you, we've already had significant interest."

"Of course you have," Carol muttered.

Helen's elbow found Carol's ribs with practiced precision. "It's beautiful from the outside," she said, her voice carrying that particular brightness she reserved for strangers and difficult social situations. "The photos online really didn't do it justice."

"Wait until you see the interior." Mark gestured them forward. "The previous owners relocated to Phoenix, a job transfer, and they've left some of the staging furniture so you can get a sense of the space. Built in 2002, approximately 2,800 square feet, two bedrooms, three bathrooms. The neighborhood association is minimal - just basic exterior maintenance standards and quiet hours."

"Quiet hours," Carol repeated. "What happens during loud hours?"

Mark's smile didn't waver, which meant he'd dealt with difficult buyers before. "I assure you, Mrs. Sturka, this is one of the most peaceful streets in the area. The cul-de-sac design means virtually no through traffic."

"Peaceful," Carol said. "Is that realtor code for 'your neighbors are all eighty and go to bed at seven'?"

"Carol." Helen's voice held a warning note, but her eyes were already elsewhere, scanning the entryway with barely contained excitement. "Oh, look at those windows."

The windows were, Carol had to admit, impressive. Floor-to-ceiling in the main living area, flooding the space with the kind of golden afternoon light that photographers charged extra for. The floors were some sort of warm-toned tile that probably stayed cool in summer, and the walls were that particular shade of off-white that managed to feel inviting rather than sterile.

The furniture, however, was a crime scene.

"Who," Carol said slowly, "decided that a leather sectional in that shade of burgundy was acceptable?"

Helen laughed. "It's staging furniture. It's not staying."

"It should be burned. This is what happens when you let a man pick furniture unsupervised."

Mark cleared his throat. "The furniture is, of course, not included in the sale. The previous owners simply wanted potential buyers to be able to visualize how the space might-"

"I'm visualizing," Carol said. "I'm visualizing a bonfire."

Helen had already moved deeper into the living room, her fingers trailing along the back of an armchair that was only marginally less offensive than the sectional. She stopped at the window, silhouette framed against the mountains, and Carol felt something shift in her chest. Something inconvenient.

"The natural light in here is incredible," Helen said quietly. "Can you imagine waking up to this every morning?"

Carol could, actually. That was the problem.

The kitchen was rustic in a way that suggested intention rather than neglect. Terracotta tile backsplash. Wooden cabinets with wrought-iron handles. A farmhouse sink that looked like it belonged in a magazine spread about authentic Southwestern living or whatever nonsense people paid thirty dollars a year to read about.

"The appliances were updated in 2015," Mark said, opening the refrigerator to demonstrate its existence. "Gas range, convection oven, built-in microwave."

"We have DoorDash," Carol said.

Helen shot her a look. "We also have the ability to cook. Occasionally. When we're not being deliberately obtuse."

"I'm not being obtuse. I'm being practical. We've lived in that apartment for six years and the most ambitious thing I've made is toast."

"That's because the apartment kitchen is the size of a closet." Helen moved to the window above the sink, looking out at what Carol assumed was the backyard. "Oh my god, Carol. Come look at this."

"I can see from here."

"You can't. Come here."

Carol didn't move. She was looking at the countertops, which were some sort of granite or quartz, flecked with copper and gold that caught the light from the window. She was thinking about how the apartment kitchen had laminate counters that were starting to peel at the edges, and how she'd told herself for three years that she was going to call someone about it and never had.

"Carol."

"Fine." She crossed the kitchen, stopping beside Helen at the window.

The view was the garden. Not large by suburban standards, but larger than their apartment's shared courtyard, which mostly contained cigarette butts and the occasional lost flip-flop. This garden had actual plants. A patio. Something that looked suspiciously like a whirlpool.

"Doing the dishes with that view?" Helen nudged Carol's shoulder. "Come on."

"We have a dishwasher."

"You know what I mean."

Carol did know what she meant. She knew exactly what Helen meant, which was why she needed to not admit it.

"I see a lot of maintenance," she said instead. "I see watering schedules and weed control and probably some kind of pest situation we'd have to deal with. Scorpions. This is New Mexico. There are definitely scorpions."

Helen's hand found Carol's, their fingers interlacing with the ease of twenty years of practice. "There are also sunsets," she said. "And privacy. And space."

Space for what? Carol wanted to ask. But she knew. She'd known since Helen had left the listing printout on Carol's nightstand three weeks ago, weighed down by Carol's reading glasses so she couldn't miss it. No note. No explanation. Just the photos and the price and Helen's silence at breakfast the next morning, which was louder than any argument they'd ever had.

Space for more than what they had. Space for what they might become.

Carol pulled her hand away, but gently. "Show me the bathrooms. I want to see how much mold we'd be inheriting."

The upstairs bathrooms had no mold. This was, Carol felt, deeply suspicious.

"Two sinks," Helen said, running her hand along the marble vanity in the master bathroom. "His and hers. Or hers and hers, in our case."

"Because that's what our relationship has been missing. Separate sinks."

Helen ignored this. She was looking at the bathtub now - freestanding, positioned near a window that probably offered a view of the mountains if you were the type of person who wanted to contemplate geological formations while naked and pruning.

"And look at this shower." Helen pulled open the glass door, revealing a space large enough to park a small car. Two rainfall showerheads. Bench seating. The kind of tile work that suggested either professional installation or a previous owner with too much time and money.

Helen turned and winked at Carol.

Carol felt her face warm. "That's impractical. The water bill alone…"

"Would be worth it."

Mark, to his credit, had made himself scarce during this portion of the tour, claiming he needed to check something in the garage. Carol suspected he'd simply developed a sixth sense for when couples needed a moment to contemplate shower-related possibilities without a realtor hovering nearby.

"The closet space is inadequate," Carol said, retreating to the bedroom. The master closet was, in fact, generously sized, with built-in shelving and what appeared to be a small chandelier. "I'd have nowhere to put my... things."

"Your things." Helen followed her, arms crossed, smile knowing. "Your extensive wardrobe of identical white t-shirts, a handful of tank-tops, and that one yellow leather jacket?"

"I have other clothes."

"You have variations on the same clothes. It's not the same thing."

Carol opened one of the closet drawers, which slid smoothly on its track, because of course it did. "What's the other bedroom for?"

The question came out before she could stop it. She heard the weight in it, the implication, and watched Helen's expression shift into something careful.

"Guest room," Helen said. "For now."

For now.

Two words. Ordinary words. The kind of words that contained entire futures if you let them.

Carol closed the drawer. "We should see the office."

The office was smaller than the other rooms, tucked at the end of the hallway like an afterthought. But it had good light - eastern exposure, which would mean morning sun - and built-in bookshelves lining one wall. A previous owner had left a tiny desk, square shaped and the white paint already flaking off, positioned to face the window.

"Previous owner used this as a home office," Mark said, reappearing with the timing of someone who'd been listening at the door. "But it could be anything, really. Media room. Hobby space. Nursery."

Carol felt Helen go still beside her.

"Office is fine," Carol said quickly. "I could use a dedicated writing space."

Helen turned to look at her, something flickering in her expression. Hope, maybe. Or just surprise at hearing Carol admit she wanted something.

"You'd finally have room to spread out," Helen said carefully. "Stop complaining about the apartment desk being too small."

"I don't complain."

"You complained this morning. You complained while making coffee. You said, and I quote, 'This desk is a war crime against ergonomics.'"

"That's not complaining. That's stating facts."

Helen's smile was soft now, the teasing edge faded. She was looking at Carol the way she sometimes did in the early mornings, when she thought Carol was still asleep. Like she was seeing something Carol couldn't quite see in herself.

"I can picture you here," Helen said. "Working on the next book. Maybe something new."

Something new. Carol let the words sit there, examined them like a stone she'd found in her shoe. The Wycaro sequel was already outlined, already half-drafted, already exactly what her publisher wanted: more Lucasia, more Raban, more gossamer threads of shang silk shimmering like spun gold. But sometimes, late at night when Helen was asleep and the apartment was quiet, Carol opened a blank document and stared at the cursor blinking against all that white space. She never typed anything. She didn't even know what she'd type if she tried. Just that there was something else in there, something that wasn't pirates and romance and prose she privately described as "mindless crap for people who've given up." Something that felt like hers.

"Maybe," she said.

The garden looked different from ground level. Bigger. More real. The whirlpool was indeed a whirlpool, sunk into a stone patio and surrounded by the kind of desert landscaping that suggested someone had actually consulted a professional.

"This is a lot of grass," Carol said. "Grass means mowing. Mowing means either paying someone or doing it myself, and I don't do physical labor before noon."

"It's not that much grass."

"It's an unreasonable amount of grass. Who needs this much grass? What are we, cattle farmers?"

Helen turned slowly, taking it all in - the agave plants throwing sharp shadows across the flagstone, the chamisa bushes catching the low sun like they'd been dipped in honey, the warm beige stucco of the house glowing amber in the late afternoon light. She spun back to Carol, her face bright with something that made Carol's chest ache, and reached for her hand.

"I can see us here," she said quietly, their fingers interlacing. "In the evening. Just the quiet. Just us."

Carol looked at her. At the curve of her profile, the way the light played across her features, the small smile that hadn't left her face since they'd arrived. Twenty years. Twenty years of Helen's optimism wearing down Carol's defenses, of Helen's warmth finding the cracks in Carol's armor, of Helen believing in futures Carol was too afraid to imagine.

"Oh yes," Carol heard herself say. "Grass to mow, water to waste, dirt to track inside. Dreams do come true."

But she was standing closer to Helen now. Close enough that their shoulders touched. Close enough that Helen could lean into her slightly, a pressure so familiar Carol sometimes forgot to notice it.

"What do you think?" Helen asked. "Could this be our home?"

The word home hung in the air between them. Carol thought about their apartment, with its too-small kitchen and its peeling counters and its thin walls that let them hear their neighbor's television every night at eleven. She thought about the office at the end of the hallway, with its morning light and its built-in shelves and its space for something new. She thought about the guest room that was a guest room for now.

"It's fine," she said finally. "I guess."

Helen's smile widened.

"Don't-" Carol held up a hand. "Don't look at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you've won."

"I haven't won anything." Helen's arm slipped through Carol's, easy and natural. "We're just looking. That's all this is. Looking."

But Carol could feel the weight of the house behind her. The potential of it. The terrifying, exhilarating possibility of roots and permanence and all the things she'd spent her life avoiding.

Mark appeared in the doorway, his realtor smile firmly in place. "So, ladies. Any questions? Thoughts?"

Carol looked at Helen. Helen looked back, her blue eyes bright with everything she wasn't saying.

We're going to buy this house, Carol thought. I'm going to let Helen talk me into this, and we're going to sign papers and move boxes and hang pictures on walls, and in six months I'll probably complain about the heating bill and the commute and whatever wildlife decides to take up residence in the garden. But we're going to do it anyway. Because Helen wants it. Because maybe, somewhere beneath all the sarcasm and the resistance and the fear, I want it too.

"The shower," Carol said to Mark. "Does it have good water pressure?"

Helen laughed, and the sound echoed across the garden, and for just a moment, Carol could almost see them here. Years from now. Older. Different. Together.

"Let's discuss numbers," Helen said, and led them back inside.

The Kitchen 

The risotto required attention. Helen had explained this to Carol approximately seven times over the course of their relationship, that risotto was not a dish you could abandon, not something you could set and forget like pasta or rice from a cooker. It demanded presence. Constant stirring. A watchful eye and a patient hand.

Carol had stopped listening around explanation three, but she enjoyed watching Helen cook, so the lectures continued uninterrupted.

From her perch at the kitchen counter, Carol had a clear sightline to Helen's back as she moved between the stove and the cutting board. The late afternoon light slanted through the window above the sink, catching the steam rising from the pot and turning it gold. Helen had changed out of her work clothes into a soft grey sweater and joggers, her hair pulled back in a loose ponytail that was already starting to escape its elastic.

Carol's manuscript pages sat in front of her, chapter twelve of the Wycaro sequel, covered in red pen marks that were starting to blur together. She'd been staring at the same paragraph for ten minutes. Something about Lucasia's "heaving bosom" that her editor had flagged as "perhaps excessive, even for the genre." Carol was inclined to agree but couldn't summon the energy to fix it.

Helen's bosom, she noted absently, did not heave. It existed in a state of quiet dignity beneath the grey sweater, rising and falling with the rhythm of her breathing as she stirred.

"You're staring."

Carol blinked. "I'm reviewing."

"You're staring at me instead of reviewing." Helen didn't turn around. "I can feel it. It's very distracting."

"Maybe you shouldn't be so distracting."

"Maybe you should focus on your heaving bosoms."

"You read that page."

"It was lying on the counter this morning. Next to the coffee maker. Where you left it." Helen's tone was innocent, but Carol knew better. "I can't help what my eyes land on while I'm waiting for the French press."

Carol made a noise that was somewhere between a groan and a laugh. "I hate this book."

"You hate every book. Until it's finished, and then you hate it slightly less, and then it sells three hundred thousand copies and you hate it again for different reasons." Helen pried open the mushroom container, and her stirring hand went still.

"What?"

Helen held up the container. Even from across the kitchen, Carol could see the problem, a fuzzy grey-green coating that had colonized approximately half the mushrooms, transforming them from ingredient to biohazard.

"Well," Helen said, her voice carrying that particular brightness that meant she was about to ruin Carol's evening, "this is disappointing."

"No."

"These mushrooms are completely-"

"Helen, no."

"-ruined." Helen turned, and her expression was the picture of innocent regret. "Looks like someone gets to make a trip to Sprouts."

Carol set down her pen with the deliberate care of someone trying very hard not to throw it. "It's six-thirty."

"I'm aware of the time."

"On a Tuesday."

"The day of the week hasn't escaped me either."

"The evening staff at Sprouts are…" Carol searched for the right word. "Suspicious."

Helen's eyebrow rose. "Suspicious."

"They follow me around. Like I'm casing the produce section for a heist. Like I'm going to stuff organic kale down my pants and make a run for it."

"To be fair, you do have a suspicious energy."

"I have a private energy. There's a difference." Carol slid off the stool, her bare feet hitting the cool tile. "Why can't you go? You're the one who bought moldy mushrooms."

"I'm also the one making you dinner." Helen gestured at the stove with her wooden spoon, a movement that managed to be both graceful and vaguely threatening. "The risotto needs constant stirring. If I leave, it dies. If it dies, we eat cereal. Is that what you want, Carol? Cereal for dinner?"

"I've had cereal for dinner before. I survived."

"Sure." Helen closed the distance between them, pressing a quick kiss to Carol's cheek as she passed. She smelled like parsley and butter and something floral - her shampoo, maybe, or just the particular scent of Helen that Carol had never been able to identify or replicate. "Cremini mushrooms. One package. And if they try to follow you, just glare at them. You're very good at glaring."

"I know I am. I've been practicing on you for quite a while now."

Helen laughed, already back at the stove, her attention returning to the pot. "Almost two decades, and you still haven't scared me off."

"Not for lack of trying."

Carol grabbed her keys from the hook by the door, shoved her feet into the boots she'd left by the entrance, and cast one last look at Helen's back. The sweater had ridden up slightly, exposing a thin strip of skin above her joggers. Carol considered, briefly, abandoning the mushroom mission entirely in favor of more interesting pursuits.

"I can still feel you staring," Helen said without turning.

"I'm going. I'm leaving right now."

"Cremini mushrooms."

"I heard you the first time."

"And don't forget to-"

The door closed behind Carol before Helen could finish the sentence.

The Sprouts run took thirty-three minutes.

This was longer than strictly necessary, but Carol had gotten trapped in a one-sided conversation with an elderly woman in the produce section who wanted to discuss the relative merits of various mushroom varieties and whether Carol had ever tried lion's mane, which was supposed to be excellent for brain function, not that Carol looked like she needed help in that department, but you could never be too careful, could you?

Carol could not, in fact, be too careful. She'd learned this the hard way.

By the time she pulled back into the driveway, the sky had deepened to purple and the house was glowing warm against the desert dark.

Carol let herself in through the side door inside the garage, the one that opened directly into the kitchen, and was immediately hit with a wall of smell so good it made her knees weak. Garlic. Butter. White wine. The risotto had progressed from "pot of rice" to "actual food," and Helen had clearly been busy.

But it wasn't the smell that stopped Carol in the doorway.

It was the music.

The opening synth notes of "Take My Breath Away" drifted from the small speaker Helen kept on the counter, the one she used for podcasts while cooking and eighties power ballads when she thought no one was listening. And Helen - her Helen, her composed and capable Helen who managed Carol's career and Carol's moods and Carol's entire goddamn life with effortless grace - was dancing.

Not dancing, exactly. Swaying. Moving her hips in a slow figure-eight while she stirred, her free hand tugging the elastic free and shaking out her hair, dark waves spilling across her shoulders in a way that made Carol forget, momentarily, why she'd ever agreed to leave the house for mushrooms.

Watching every motion in my foolish lover's game...

Carol leaned against the doorframe. She didn't announce herself. She didn't move.

Twenty years ago - more than twenty years ago now, god - they'd seen Top Gun at a revival screening in Santa Fe. Some theater's "Classics of the Cold War" series, or "Eighties Nostalgia Night," or whatever excuse they'd used to charge twelve dollars for a thirty-year-old movie about homoerotic volleyball and fighter jets. It had been their fourth date, maybe their fifth, back when Carol was still pretending she didn't know where this was going and Helen was still pretending she wasn't already in love. The movie had been fine. Mediocre, really. Tom Cruise's ego rendered in celluloid. But this song had played during a scene Carol couldn't remember anymore, and Helen had leaned over in the dark and whispered, "This is our song now," and Carol had said, "It absolutely is not," and Helen had said, "Too late, I've decided," and that had been that.

A mediocre song from a mediocre movie, and Helen still danced to it in the kitchen when she thought she was alone. Carol supposed she should be grateful it wasn't "Danger Zone."

Haunted by the notion, somewhere there's a love in flames...

Helen spun, a slow turn that brought her face-to-face with the doorway, and her eyes flew open.

"Oh!" Her hand went to her chest, the wooden spoon flinging a small arc of risotto across the counter. "Jesus, Carol. How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough."

"You could've announced yourself. Made a noise. Coughed."

"And miss the show?" Carol pushed off the doorframe, setting the Sprouts bag on the counter. "Never."

Helen's cheeks had gone pink, embarrassment or exertion or some combination of both. She was smiling, though. That particular smile she saved for moments when Carol caught her being soft, being silly, being something other than the composed professional face she showed the world.

"I was just…"

"Dancing."

"Stretching. While stirring."

"Helen."

"Fine. Dancing." Helen turned back to the stove, but Carol could see the smile hadn't faded. "It's a good song."

"It's a mediocre song that you've decided is a good song through sheer force of will."

"That's how all good songs become good songs."

Carol moved closer, drawn by something she couldn't name. The kitchen was warm from the stove, fragrant with dinner, and Helen was right there, still swaying almost imperceptibly as she stirred.

"Come on," Helen said, not looking up. "You know this song."

"I know lots of songs. Doesn't mean I dance to them."

"Dance with me."

"I don't dance."

"You do. You just pretend you don't." Helen set down the spoon, turning to face Carol fully. She held out her hand, palm up, like an invitation. Like a dare. "One dance. The risotto needs to rest anyway."

"Risotto doesn't rest. You just said it needs constant attention."

"I lied. It needs to rest. For exactly one song." Helen's hand was still extended, patient and steady. "Please?"

The word undid her. It always did. Helen so rarely asked for anything, so rarely made herself vulnerable enough to want something out loud, that when she did, Carol found herself incapable of refusal.

She took Helen's hand.

"If I step on your feet-"

"You won't."

"If I do-"

"Then I'll survive." Helen pulled her closer, one hand finding the small of Carol's back, the other still clasped in Carol's own. "I've survived worse."

They swayed. It wasn't really dancing, Carol didn't know how to really dance, had never learned, had refused every attempt Helen had made over the years to teach her. But this, this slow movement in their warm kitchen with the risotto steaming on the stove and the desert dark pressing against the windows - this she could do.

Take my breath away...

"This song is four minutes long," Carol muttered against Helen's shoulder.

"Three minutes and fifty-eight seconds, actually."

"You've timed it."

"I've danced to it enough times to know."

Carol snorted, but she didn't pull away. Helen's hand was warm against her back, thumb tracing small circles through her shirt. They weren't really moving anymore, just standing close, breathing together.

"The mushrooms," Carol said eventually. "I got the mushrooms."

"I saw."

"The woman at Sprouts tried to sell me on lion's mane."

"Did you buy any?"

"No. I told her I didn't need help with brain function."

Helen laughed, a small huff of breath against Carol's hair. "How did she take that?"

"Poorly. I think I offended her."

"You do have that effect on people."

The song was winding down, the synth fading into something softer, and Carol found she didn't want to let go. Didn't want to step back into the bright kitchen light and the manuscript waiting on the counter and all the ordinary moments that made up a life. She wanted to stay here, in the warm dark of Helen's arms, where nothing was required of her except presence.

"Hey," Helen said softly.

Carol lifted her head.

Helen was looking at her with that expression again, the one from the real estate listing, from the office at the end of the hallway, from a thousand moments over the years when she'd seen something in Carol that Carol couldn't see in herself.

"Thank you," Helen said.

"For what? Getting mushrooms?"

"For dancing with me."

Carol held her gaze. The music had stopped, the speaker had moved on to something else, something softer, but neither of them were listening anymore.

"You're ridiculous," Carol said finally.

"I know."

"And this song is still mediocre."

"I know that too."

"And I love you. Absurdly. Against my better judgment."

Helen's smile spread slowly, warm and real. "I know that most of all."

She kissed Carol then - soft, unhurried, tasting faintly of white wine - and when she pulled back, her eyes were bright.

"Now," she said, stepping away and reaching for the mushrooms, "let me finish this risotto before it becomes completely unsalvageable."

Carol watched her move back to the stove, efficient and graceful, already slicing mushrooms with practiced hands. The kitchen settled back into its ordinary rhythms: the hiss of the pan, the scrape of the spoon, the quiet domesticity of two people building a life in the spaces between moments.

Carol picked up her manuscript. Stared at the heaving bosom. Set it down again.

"Helen?"

"Mm?"

Carol opened her mouth. Closed it. Tried again.

"The risotto," she said finally. "It smells... good."

Helen's hand stilled on the spoon. She didn't turn around, but Carol could see the shift in her posture - the slight straightening of her spine, the almost imperceptible tilt of her head.

"Carol Sturka." Helen's voice was carefully neutral, the way it got when she was trying very hard not to laugh. "Did you just compliment my cooking?"

"I said 'good.' That's an observation. A factual statement about the absence of terribleness."

"Mm-hm."

"It's not the same as a compliment."

"Of course not."

Helen turned then, wooden spoon still in hand, and the look on her face made Carol's throat tight. Not smug, not teasing, just soft. Like Carol had handed her something precious without meaning to.

"For what it's worth," Helen said quietly, "I'm used to translating. After all this time." She reached out, tucking a strand of hair behind Carol's ear with her free hand. "'Not terrible' from you is basically a marriage proposal from anyone else."

"You already have one of those."

"I do." Helen's thumb traced Carol's cheekbone, feather-light. "Lucky me."

Birthday Wishes

"Close your eyes."

Carol stared at Helen with the expression she usually reserved for telemarketers and people who clapped when airplanes landed. "No."

"Carol."

"The last time you told me to close my eyes, we were in bed and you did that thing with the-"

"Not that kind of surprise." Helen's cheeks had gone pink, but she was fighting a smile. "This is a birthday surprise. A wholesome birthday surprise."

"Pity."

"Close your eyes."

They were standing in the upstairs hallway, outside the door to what had been, until recently, the empty room at the end. The one the realtor had called an office. The one Helen had been suspiciously protective of for the past three weeks, deflecting Carol's questions with a breezy "it's a surprise" that had grown increasingly less breezy and more manic as December approached.

Carol had her theories. A home gym, maybe, Helen had been making noises about wanting a treadmill that didn't require driving to a facility full of strangers in matching activewear. Or a reading nook, which Helen had Pinterest boards dedicated to, boards Carol pretended not to know about but had definitely scrolled through at 2 AM when she couldn't sleep.

"If there's a treadmill in there," Carol said, "I want you to know that I will never use it. Not once. It will become an extremely expensive clothes rack."

"There's no treadmill."

"If there's a Peloton-"

"Carol." Helen's hands were on Carol's shoulders now, warm and steady. "It's your birthday. I've been working on this for weeks. Please, for once in your life, just trust me and close your eyes."

Something in Helen's voice, not quite pleading, but close, made Carol's resistance crumble. She'd never been able to hold out against that particular tone.

"Fine." Carol closed her eyes. "But if I open them and there's exercise equipment of any kind, I'm filing for divorce."

"Noted."

She heard the door open. Felt Helen's hand slip into hers, guiding her forward. The floor changed beneath her feet - still hardwood, but warmer somehow, like the room had been holding the afternoon sun.

"Okay," Helen said, and Carol could hear the barely contained excitement vibrating through the word. "Open."

Carol opened her eyes.

For a moment, she couldn't process what she was seeing. Her brain kept trying to reconcile the empty room she remembered - beige walls, builder-grade carpet, a single window overlooking the backyard - with the space that now existed in its place.

The carpet was gone. In its place, dark hardwood floors that gleamed in the late afternoon light. The walls had been painted a warm cream, not quite white, not quite ivory, something that caught the light and made the room feel both cozy and expansive. And everywhere, everywhere, there were details that made something shift behind Carol's ribs.

A ship's wheel mounted on one wall, weathered wood and brass fittings that looked genuinely antique. Framed nautical maps - old ones, the kind with sea monsters in the corners and Latin labels for bodies of water that no longer existed. A brass telescope on a stand near the window. Rope coiled artfully on a shelf. A small collection of glass bottles in varying shades of blue and green, catching the light like captured pieces of the sea.

It looked like something out of a theme park. Like the set piece designers at Universal Studios had been asked to create "romantic pirate captain's quarters" and someone had handed them an unlimited budget and a copy of Winds of Wycaro. Carol half-expected to find Raban's coat hanging on a hook, or Lucasia's navigation charts spread across a table.

"Helen," Carol said, and her voice came out strange. Rough.

"Wait, there's more." Helen tugged her forward, practically bouncing. "You haven't even seen the best part."

The desk sat in the middle of the room, positioned to face the window. It was massive, solid oak, dark with age, covered in the kind of scratches and wear marks that suggested decades of actual use. The surface was slightly uneven, warped in places, and there was a water ring near one corner that someone had tried and failed to sand out.

It was, without question, the most beautiful piece of furniture Carol had ever seen.

"Craigslist," Helen said proudly. "I found it two weeks ago. I'd almost given up, honestly - I must have looked at fifty desks, and they were all either too new or too ugly or too Office Depot. But then this listing popped up. This couple in Los Lunas, they were moving to Florida, couldn't take it with them. You should've seen their house, Carol. Dolls everywhere. Like, everywhere. On every surface. In the bathroom. I'm pretty sure some of them were watching me."

"You went to a stranger's house full of dolls. For a desk."

"For your desk. And it was worth it. Mostly." Helen ran her hand along the edge of the wood. "Getting it here was... an adventure. The husband - Earl, his name was Earl, of course it was Earl - he said he'd help transport it for an extra hundred dollars. But when he showed up, he had his two sons with him. These enormous guys, both of them. Had to be six-three, six-four. Built like linebackers. And I swear to God, Carol, they could not have been older than sixteen."

"Sixteen."

"Maybe seventeen. They were like Waldorf and Statler, but young. And significantly less clever." Helen's expression shifted into something that was half amusement, half trauma. "One of them kept calling things 'fire.' As in, 'Dude, this desk is fire.' And then they saw the photos. You know, the ones in the living room. Of us."

Carol felt her eyebrows rise. "And?"

"And the other one - the one with the acne - he stops dead in the middle of our hallway, looks at his brother, and goes, 'Dude. Dude. You think she's a lesbian?'" Helen's impression was remarkably accurate. "And then the brother elbows him and says, 'Dude, no judgment. We're cool with that. Love is love, you know? My friend Tyler's mom is gay and she makes, like, the best brownies.'"

"Love is love."

"Love is love. And then Earl yelled at both of them to stop talking and just carry the damn desk, and one said, 'Chill, Dad, we're just being allies,' and I thought Earl was going to have an aneurysm right there in our foyer."

Carol was laughing now, actually laughing, the sound escaping before she could stop it. "You paid a man named Earl and his two ally linebacker children to carry a haunted desk into our house."

"It's not haunted."

"It's absolutely haunted. Look at it. This desk has seen things, Helen. This desk has done things."

"It's rustic." Helen was grinning, clearly pleased with herself. "And it's yours. For writing. For plotting. For doing whatever it is you do when you're staring at a blank document and muttering under your breath about Lucasia's narrative arc."

Carol approached the desk slowly, running her fingers along the surface. The wood was cool and smooth, worn soft by years of use. She could imagine someone sitting here - many someones, across many decades - writing letters, paying bills, creating something from nothing. The thought should have felt morbid. Instead, it felt like inheritance.

"There's more," Helen said, tugging her toward the opposite corner.

The painting station was smaller than the desk but no less considered. An easel - a real one, wooden and adjustable, not the flimsy aluminum thing Carol had been using for years. A rolling cart filled with supplies: paints organized by color, brushes sorted by size, palette knives and mixing trays and a stack of canvases in varying dimensions. A drafting table beside it, angled for sketching, with a lamp attached that could be positioned for different light sources.

"You paint," Helen said simply. "I know you don't talk about it much. But I've seen the sketchbooks. The ones you think you've hidden in the closet."

Carol's throat was tight. "Those are just… They're nothing. Doodles."

"They're not nothing." Helen's voice was soft now, the excitement tempered into something quieter. "They're yours. And you should have space for them."

Carol didn't trust herself to respond. She turned instead to the wall where the old TV had been, the massive flat-screen the previous owners had left behind, hidden between two wooden sliding doors like a secret meant to be discovered.

The doors were still there. But when Carol pulled them open, there was no TV behind them.

A large whiteboard stretched across the wall, pristine and blank, waiting to be filled.

"There's another one behind it," Helen said. "They slide. So you can have two different projects going at once, or use one for plotting and one for character work, or-"

"You know," Carol said slowly, "I do remember letting some very confused workers into our house. And I remember hearing drilling. Quite a lot of drilling, actually. For hours. While I was trying to write."

"Birthday surprise."

"You told me it was a birthday surprise approximately seven hundred times. While there was drilling."

"And now you know what the surprise was." Helen spread her arms. "Whiteboards! For brainstorming. For drawing elaborate conspiracy theory diagrams about your characters' motivations, which I know you do because I've seen the notebooks."

"I don't-"

"You absolutely do. You have a whole system with colored pens and string. It's very A Beautiful Mind. I find it charming."

Carol turned back to the room, taking it all in. The shelves she hadn't noticed before, filled with trinkets and photographs, a small painted tile from that market in Santa Fe, a framed picture from their wedding, a small ceramic whale Helen had bought her at a craft fair years ago because she'd said it looked grumpy and reminded her of Carol. Their high school diplomas hung side by side on one wall, slightly crooked, a detail that was so perfectly Helen that Carol's eyes stung. The window seat built into the bay window, cushioned in cream fabric, perfect for reading or staring out at the desert while pretending to think about plot points.

Every detail. Every single detail had been chosen with her in mind. Not a generic office, not a room pulled from a catalog, but a space that was unmistakably, irrevocably hers.

"Helen." Carol's voice cracked on the name.

"Too much?" Helen moved closer, worry flickering across her features. "I know it's a lot. I might have gone overboard with the nautical stuff. The telescope was maybe excessive. If you hate it-"

"I don't hate it."

"…we can change things. Move things around. The ship's wheel can go in the garage-"

"Helen." Carol turned to face her. "Stop talking."

Helen stopped.

Carol reached for her, pulling her close, and kissed her. Not the quick, habitual kisses of morning goodbyes or evening hellos, but something slower. Deliberate. The kind of kiss that said things Carol had never been good at saying out loud.

When she pulled back, Helen's eyes were bright, a little wet, and she was smiling the way she only smiled when she was genuinely, unreservedly happy.

"It's perfect," Carol said quietly. "It's the most ridiculous, over-the-top, excessive thing anyone has ever done for me, and it's perfect."

"Yeah?"

"The telescope is absurd. I'm never going to use the telescope."

"I know."

"And the ship's wheel is completely impractical. Where would I even steer to? The bathroom?"

"I thought it added ambiance."

"It adds something." Carol's thumb traced Helen's cheekbone. "Thank you. I don't… I'm not good at this part. The saying-things part. But thank you."

Helen leaned into the touch. "You're welcome. Happy birthday, Carol."

"Forty-six." Carol grimaced. "I'm officially closer to fifty than forty."

"You're officially the same person you were yesterday, just with a nicer office."

"Study."

"What?"

"It's a study. Offices are for accountants and middle managers. This," Carol gestured at the room, at the maps and the telescope and the haunted Craigslist desk. "This is a study."

Helen laughed, and the sound filled the space, bouncing off the warm walls and settling into the corners like it belonged there.

"Fine," she said. "Happy birthday. Welcome to your study."

Carol looked around one more time - at the easel waiting for paint, the whiteboards waiting for plans, the desk waiting for words she hadn't written yet. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a door opened. Not a title, not yet, she didn't have anything but the vague, persistent sense that there was something else inside her, something that wasn't pirates and romance and gossamer threads of shang silk.

But maybe. Someday. In this room that Helen had made just for her.

Maybe.

"I suppose," Carol said slowly, her gaze drifting back to the desk, "that we should christen it."

Helen followed her eyes. "The desk?"

"The desk."

"Carol, that desk is a hundred years old. How many people do you think have already fucked on it?"

"I don't care about other people." Carol pulled Helen closer by her belt loops. "I care about us."

Helen laughed, but she was already leaning in. "Earl's teenage sons carried that desk up our stairs."

"And now we're going to make them regret it."

"That's... an interesting motivation."

"I'm an interesting person."

Helen kissed her again, still laughing against her mouth. "Happy birthday to you, I guess."

"Best birthday present ever," Carol murmured. "The desk, I mean. Not-"

"I know what you meant."

"Good."

The late afternoon light shifted, painting everything in shades of gold and amber. The desk gleamed. The telescope caught the sun. The whiteboards waited, patient and blank, for whatever came next.

But that could wait.

Right now, Carol had a desk to christen.

Figure Studies

Carol doesn't usually think about Mr. Calder unless something pulls the memory loose.

It's the smell first, oil paint, even diluted and modern, still sharp enough to drag her back. She keeps her brush moving. Stopping feels dangerous.

She'd liked drawing long before it was practical. Back when money was scarce and paper came from wherever she could find it - the backs of grocery receipts, the blank margins of her mother's discarded magazines, the inside of cereal boxes flattened and smoothed. After school, she'd go next door to Mr. Calder's house. He was gruff, impatient, and rarely smiled, but he never told her to leave. He showed her how to hold a brush, how to look longer than felt comfortable, how not to be afraid of making something ugly first. He gave advice the same way he critiqued paintings - blunt, useful, and unsentimental. Carol liked that. It felt honest in a way nothing else in her life did.

The day he died, she hadn't gone over.

She had reasons. School. Rules. A punishment she hadn't argued hard enough against. She told herself she'd check on him later. Tomorrow. There was always tomorrow.

Instead, she watched the hearse from her bedroom window. She hadn't known it would look so ordinary. Just a car. Just men moving carefully, as if this wasn't the end of someone's whole life. Mr. Calder had been dead for days. Alone. In a house full of paintings no one would ever see.

The guilt settled in quietly and never really left.

Not long after, strangers cleared out the house. His paintings, his brushes, everything he'd made, thrown into containers like debris. A couple moved in. Fresh paint erased him completely. Carol remembers standing on the sidewalk, watching them carry in a leather sectional, and thinking: this is how it ends. This is what happens to the things you make. Someone throws them away and buys new furniture.

She stopped drawing after that. Not on purpose. She just never picked it up again.

Now, decades later, she paints again because Helen asked her to. Because Helen noticed the painting corner gathering dust in her study and said, casually, over breakfast, "You know, there's a community class at the rec center. Tuesdays. No deadlines, no expectations, no audience. Just paint." And then, because Helen knew exactly how to land the blow: "Other perspectives might be good for you. Shake something loose."

Carol had agreed only because arguing with Helen required more energy than capitulating. That was her excuse, anyway. The truth was harder to look at directly - something about the easel in the corner, the brushes still wrapped in plastic, the way Helen had arranged everything so carefully for a birthday that felt like a dare.

So she went. She's been going for six weeks now. And every Tuesday, she comes home feeling like she's failed an exam she didn't know she was taking.

"Let me see."

Carol looked up from where she was cleaning her brushes at the kitchen sink. Helen was leaning against the doorframe to the kitchen, arms crossed, expression carefully neutral in the way that meant she was about to be very, very interested in something Carol didn't want to discuss.

"See what?"

"The paintings. From class."

"They're not finished."

"I didn't ask if they were finished. I asked to see them."

Carol turned off the water. Dried her hands on a towel that was already streaked with cadmium yellow. Buying time, and they both knew it.

"They're not good," she said.

"I didn't ask if they were good either."

"Helen."

"Carol."

The standoff lasted approximately four seconds, a new record. Carol threw the towel onto the counter and gestured toward the stairs with the resigned air of someone walking toward their own execution.

"Fine. But I'm warning you now, they're terrible. The instructor keeps talking about 'capturing the essence of form' and I keep producing things that look like they belong in a medical textbook. A bad medical textbook. Written by someone who's never actually seen a human body."

Helen followed her up the stairs and into the study, where three canvases were propped against the wall in various states of completion. Carol had positioned them face-down that morning, which in retrospect was probably a mistake - it only drew more attention to their existence.

She flipped them over before Helen could comment on the obvious avoidance.

"This one," Carol said, pointing to the leftmost canvas, "is supposed to be a seated figure. You'll notice it looks more like a potato with ambitions. This one," she moved to the middle "was an attempt at foreshortening that I'm fairly certain violates several laws of physics. And this one-"

"Carol."

"-is what happens when you try to paint hands without actually understanding how joints work. Which, apparently, I don't. Despite having hands. Despite having used hands my entire life."

Helen was quiet, studying the canvases with an expression Carol couldn't read. This was worse than criticism. Criticism Carol could handle, could deflect, could argue with, could transform into a spirited debate about the subjective nature of art. Silence left her exposed.

"The class is fine," Carol continued, because filling silence was preferable to drowning in it. "I mean, it's insufferable, but it's fine. There's this guy, Derek, who thinks he's the next Basquiat because he took one semester of art history at community college. He gives unsolicited feedback on everyone's work. Everyone's. Last week he told this woman, Margaret - lovely woman, paints these little watercolor flowers - that her color palette was 'emotionally dishonest.' Whatever that means."

"Carol."

"And there's a mom who brings her kid's artwork to show us. Every week. The kid is four. The artwork is... I mean, it's what you'd expect from a four-year-old. Lots of purple. Lots of scribbles. But she acts like he's a prodigy, like we should all be taking notes. 'Little Aiden really understands negative space,' she says. Aiden drew a circle, Sarah. It's a circle."

"Carol."

"And don't get me started on the Hendersons. Married fifty years, and they spend every class correcting each other's technique. 'That's not how you hold a palette knife, Harold.' 'Well, Barbara, maybe if you'd listened to me in 1974-'"

"Carol."

Carol stopped. Helen was looking at her with that particular expression - patient, knowing, infinitely gentle - that meant she'd been seen through completely.

"You're deflecting," Helen said.

"I'm contextualizing."

"You're deflecting by contextualizing." Helen moved closer to the canvases, tilting her head. "These aren't terrible."

"They're-"

"They're stiff." Helen held up a hand before Carol could interrupt. "I'm not criticizing. I'm observing. The proportions are fine. The shading is fine. But they look..." She searched for the word. "Uncomfortable. Like the figures don't want to be there."

Carol felt something loosen in her chest, the particular relief of being understood, even when understanding hurt.

"They don't," she admitted. "Want to be there. Because they're not real."

Helen turned to look at her.

"The mannequins," Carol said. "The class uses these wooden artist's mannequins as references. You know the kind, little jointed figures that are supposed to help you understand anatomy. Except they're wrong. The joints don't bend right. The torsos don't carry weight. Everything looks posed instead of lived-in."

She moved to the middle canvas, the foreshortening disaster, and jabbed a finger at the figure's shoulder.

"Look at this. This is what happens when your reference is a wooden doll. The arm is technically correct - the angle, the proportion - but it looks like it's been arranged by someone who's never actually had an arm. There's no... no settling. No sense that this body has ever existed in space, has ever breathed or shifted or gotten tired of holding still."

"So the problem isn't your skill," Helen said slowly. "It's your reference."

"The problem is that I'm trying to paint something alive using something dead as a model." Carol dropped onto the window seat, suddenly exhausted. "And I can't. I can't make the translation. Every time I try, I end up with these... these uncanny valley nightmares that look like they're about to come to life and murder someone."

Helen was quiet for a moment. Then she sat down beside Carol, close enough that their shoulders touched.

"What if you used a different reference?"

"There's no live model. The class can't afford one. It's a rec center, Helen, not the Sorbonne."

"I didn't mean in class."

Carol looked at her. Helen's expression was calm, almost casual, but there was something careful beneath it - an offer being extended with deliberate lightness, as if to make it easier to refuse.

"You," Carol said.

"Me."

"As a model."

"I have been told I possess a body. By medical professionals and everything."

Carol laughed, but it came out strangled. "That's… no. That's weird."

"Why?"

"Because-" Carol gestured vaguely. "Because it's you. Because I'd mess it up. Because you'd be sitting there, and I'd be staring at you, and it would be-"

"Intimate?"

The word hung in the air between them. Carol looked away first.

"I know what you look like," she said quietly. "I know every inch of you. I've known for years. But that's different. That's... that's private. Personal. Painting you would be like… like making it visible. Putting it on a canvas where anyone could see."

"No one would see but you," Helen said. "And me. And maybe Derek, if he breaks into our house to deliver unsolicited feedback."

Carol snorted despite herself.

"I'm serious," Helen continued. "If the problem is that you can't paint from something that doesn't feel real, then use something that does. Use me. I trust you."

I trust you. Three words. Simple words. And yet they landed somewhere deep, in a place Carol had thought was sealed shut.

"Clothes distort structure," she heard herself say. "The instructor keeps telling us that. That fabric hides how bodies actually work. How they carry weight, how they fold and settle."

Helen's hand found hers. "Then no clothes."

"Helen."

"I'm not performing." Helen's voice was steady. "I'm not posing for a magazine or trying to look a certain way. I'm just... sitting. Being. If that helps you paint something that feels alive, then that's what I want to do."

Carol stared at their intertwined fingers. She thought about Mr. Calder, about the way he'd taught her to look, really look,  at the things she wanted to draw. Don't paint what you think you see, he'd said. Paint what's actually there. The difference will break your heart, but it's the only way to make something true.

"Okay," she said. "Okay."

The light in the study was different in the afternoon. Softer. Golden.

Carol had spent twenty minutes arranging and rearranging - the easel, the canvas, the chair she'd pulled from the bedroom because it had a higher back, better support. Helen had watched this performance with patient amusement, wrapped in her bathrobe, waiting.

"You're stalling," Helen observed.

"I'm preparing."

"You've moved that lamp four times."

"The angle matters."

Helen stood, and the bathrobe fell away, and Carol's brain went briefly, completely offline.

It wasn't that she hadn't seen Helen naked before. She had. Thousands of times. In showers and bedrooms and that one very memorable incident with the hot tub in Taos. But this was different. This was Helen naked and still, settling into the chair with the unconscious grace of someone entirely comfortable in her own skin, her dark hair loose around her shoulders, her pale freckled skin catching the light.

Carol picked up her brush. Put it down. Picked it up again.

"You're staring," Helen said.

"I'm supposed to be staring. That's the whole point."

"You're staring like you've never seen me before."

"I'm staring like I'm trying to figure out where to start." Carol forced herself to focus on the canvas. "It's different. When it's for this."

Helen shifted slightly, finding a more comfortable position. "Where do you usually start?"

"With a mannequin? The head. Because it's the only part that looks remotely human." Carol mixed paint on her palette, not looking up. "With you... I don't know. Everything looks human. That's the problem."

"Sounds like the opposite of a problem."

"Shut up and sit still."

Helen laughed, and the sound loosened something in Carol's chest. This was still Helen. Still them. Just with more nudity and significantly higher artistic stakes.

She started with the shoulders. The way they curved forward slightly, a habit Helen had probably developed from years of leaning over desks and contracts and Carol's chaotic manuscript pages. The line of her collarbone, catching shadow and light. The soft hollow at the base of her throat where Carol had pressed her lips a thousand times without ever really looking.

"You're frowning," Helen said.

"I'm concentrating."

"You frown when you concentrate. It's very intimidating."

"You're supposed to be still."

"My mouth is allowed to move. You didn't specify."

Carol's brush paused. "I'm trying to capture your essence of form, Helen. Derek would be very disappointed if I let you distract me."

"Derek can go capture his own essence." Helen's mouth curved into a smile. "Although I suspect he already does, every morning in the mirror."

Carol snorted, and the tension in her shoulders eased. This was the rhythm they'd always had, the push and pull, the teasing that kept things light even when they weren't.

She worked in silence for a while, letting the brush find its own path. Helen's body was so familiar, but seeing it like this - as a collection of shapes and shadows, of lines that curved and intersected - made it new again. The soft swell of her breasts. The way her weight settled into the chair, heavier on the left side because Helen always favored her left. The freckles scattered across her shoulders like constellations Carol had never thought to map.

"You're not looking at my face," Helen observed.

"I'll get to your face."

"My face is my best feature."

"Your face is one of many features, all of which require equal attention." Carol stepped back, assessing. "Also, your face keeps making expressions at me, which is extremely distracting and probably against the rules."

"What rules?"

"The rules I'm making up right now to justify ignoring your face."

Helen shifted, and Carol's brush jerked.

"Still."

"I'm cold."

"You're ruining my masterpiece."

"I'm developing hypothermia. In my own home. For art."

"The sacrifices we make." But Carol set down her brush anyway, crossing to the thermostat and nudging it higher. "Five more minutes. Then you can put the robe back on and complain about your circulation."

"Ten minutes ago you said five more minutes."

"Time is a construct."

"Time is why my left foot is falling asleep."

Carol returned to her canvas, but she was smiling now. Helen settled back into position - mostly - and the work continued.

It was strange, Carol thought, how different this felt from painting the mannequins. With those, she'd been fighting the reference, trying to force life into something fundamentally lifeless. With Helen, the life was already there. All Carol had to do was pay attention.

Don't paint what you think you see. Paint what's actually there.

She painted the softness of Helen's stomach, the slight roundness that Helen complained about and Carol loved. She painted the scar on Helen's knee from a childhood bicycle accident, barely visible now but still present if you knew where to look. She painted the way Helen's hands rested on her thighs, fingers slightly curled, relaxed in a way Carol had rarely seen her relax anywhere else.

"I can hear you thinking," Helen said.

"I'm always thinking."

"You're thinking loudly. It's disruptive to my modeling."

"Your modeling involves sitting still and occasionally complaining. I don't think my thinking is the disruptive element here."

Helen's mouth twitched. "What are you thinking about?"

Carol considered the question. The paint on her brush was drying; she added more, a warm umber for the shadows under Helen's chin.

"Mr. Calder," she said finally. "My neighbor. When I was a kid."

Helen was quiet, waiting. She knew about Mr. Calder, Carol had told her, years ago, in the fragmented way she told anyone anything about her childhood. But she'd never explained what he'd meant. What losing him had cost.

"He told me once that the hardest thing about painting people wasn't the technique. It was the looking." Carol's brush moved almost without her direction, following the line of Helen's jaw. "Really looking. At someone else. At how they exist in the world. He said most people spend their whole lives avoiding that kind of attention - giving it or receiving it. Too vulnerable."

"And yet here we are."

"Here we are." Carol stepped back again. The painting was taking shape now, still rough, still incomplete, but recognizably Helen. Not a mannequin. Not a figure study. A person. "He would have liked you, I think. He would have said you have good bones for painting."

"Is that a compliment?"

"From him? The highest."

Helen smiled, and Carol let herself look - really look - at the way it changed her face. The crinkling around her eyes. The slight asymmetry of her mouth. All the tiny imperfections that made Helen Helen, that no mannequin could ever replicate.

"Okay," Carol said. "I think that's enough for today."

Helen exhaled with exaggerated relief. "Thank God. I was about to stage a model's revolt."

"There's only one of you. It wouldn't be much of a revolt."

"I'd be very determined." Helen stood, stretching, and padded toward the end of the room. She returned a moment later wrapped in her bathrobe, feet shuffling against the hardwood, and came to stand beside Carol in front of the easel.

The painting wasn't finished. The background was barely sketched in, and the hands needed work - hands always needed work, Carol was beginning to accept this as an immutable law of the universe - and there was something not quite right about the angle of Helen's neck. But the figure was unmistakably alive. Unmistakably her.

Helen didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she reached out, fingers hovering just above the canvas, not quite touching.

"Carol." Her voice was rough.

"It's not done. The proportions are probably off. And I couldn't get your hands right, I never get hands right, I think I might just start painting everyone with mittens-"

"Carol." Helen turned to look at her, and her eyes were bright. Wet. "It's beautiful."

"It's a work in progress."

"It's me." Helen's hand found Carol's, squeezing. "You painted me. Not... not an idea of me. Not what you think I should look like. Just... me."

Carol didn't know what to say. She looked at the canvas, at the woman she'd spent half her life waking up next to, and felt something crack open in her chest. Not painful. Just... exposed. Like a door left ajar.

"I just painted what I saw," she said finally.

"I know." Helen leaned into her, warm and solid, smelling like the lavender soap she always used. "That's why it's beautiful."

They stood there for a while, not speaking, watching the late afternoon light shift across the canvas. The painting stared back at them, imperfect and unfinished and more honest than anything Carol had made in years.

"Same time tomorrow?" Helen asked.

Carol smiled. "Maybe. If you can handle the cold."

"I'll wear thicker socks."

"That defeats the purpose of a nude study."

"The socks stay on. Non-negotiable."

Carol laughed, and the sound surprised her - how easy it was, how light. She pulled Helen closer, pressing a kiss to her temple, and let herself believe, just for a moment, that this was allowed. That making something beautiful didn't have to mean losing it.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

Helen squeezed her hand.

"Anytime."

The Blanket

The sewing trunk lived in the middle of their bedroom like a patient animal, waiting to be noticed.

Helen had bought it at an estate sale in 2009 - cedar, brass hinges, a faint smell of mothballs that had taken three years to fully dissipate. Inside, in various states of organization, lay the accumulated evidence of a project that had been "almost finished" for longer than some marriages lasted.

Carol watched Helen lift the lid now, kneeling on the bedroom floor in her pajamas at 7 AM on a Saturday, and felt the familiar mix of affection and exasperation that the trunk always provoked.

"You're not."

"I am." Helen was already pulling out fabric squares, spreading them across the carpet like tarot cards. "I had a dream about it. Woke up and couldn't stop thinking about it. It's time."

"You said that in 2017."

"This time I mean it."

"You said that in 2018."

Helen ignored her, which was her standard response to accurate criticism. Carol propped herself up on one elbow, watching from the bed as Helen sorted through the accumulated squares; some finished, edges neatly hemmed; others still raw, waiting to be incorporated into whatever vision Helen had for this thing that was theoretically a blanket but functionally a monument to optimistic procrastination.

"How many squares do you even have now?"

Helen counted silently, lips moving. "Forty-seven. I need sixty-four for the size I want."

"Forty-seven. In twelve years."

"Quality takes time."

"At this rate, the blanket will be ready for our golden anniversary. We can drape it over our matching wheelchairs."

Helen held up a square of faded blue cotton - a piece Carol recognized, with a small jolt, as coming from the shirt Helen had worn on their third date. The one with the tiny embroidered flowers on the collar. Helen had spilled red wine on it that night, and Carol had spent twenty minutes in a restaurant bathroom helping her blot out the stain with club soda while Helen laughed and apologized and looked at Carol with an expression that made Carol's stomach flip in ways she hadn't been prepared for.

The shirt had been ruined, eventually. Too many washes, too many years. But Helen had kept this piece of it, had cut it carefully and saved it in a trunk for over a decade, waiting for the right moment to stitch it into something permanent.

"That's the-"

"Third date shirt. Yes." Helen smoothed the fabric with her thumb. "I was wondering if you'd remember."

Carol didn't answer. She was looking at the other squares now, recognizing them one by one. The green corduroy from Helen's favorite jacket, the one she'd finally retired after the zipper broke irreparably. A scrap of white linen from the tablecloth at their wedding reception, how had Helen even gotten that? A piece of flannel in an ugly orange plaid that Carol couldn't place until she remembered: the blanket from their first apartment, the one they'd bought at a thrift store because they couldn't afford anything better, the one they'd wrapped around themselves during the winter when the heating failed and they'd had to choose between warmth and eating something other than ramen.

"You kept all of this."

"That's the point." Helen was arranging the squares now, testing different configurations. "It's supposed to be a record. Of us. Of everything we've been through."

Carol sat up fully, pulling her knees to her chest. The morning light was doing something soft and golden to the room, catching the dust motes floating above Helen's project, and Carol felt suddenly, unexpectedly fragile, like she'd walked into a conversation she hadn't known was happening.

"When did you even start this? Really?"

Helen's hands stilled, thinking. "2009. After we got back from that trip to San Francisco. Do you remember the fabric store?"

Carol remembered. She remembered the store, and the way Helen's eyes had lit up at the bins of remnants, and the way she'd bought far too much of everything because you never know when you'll need a really good piece of velvet, Carol. She remembered thinking, at the time, that it was one of Helen's passing enthusiasms - like the pottery class, like the sourdough starter that had lived in their refrigerator for three months before quietly dying of neglect.

But Helen had kept going. Inconsistently, erratically, with gaps of months or even years between sessions. But she'd kept going.

"There's a piece in here," Helen said slowly, "that I didn't add."

Carol's stomach tightened. "What do you mean?"

Helen reached into the trunk and pulled out a square of fabric that Carol recognized immediately: a deep burgundy silk, slightly faded, with a pattern of tiny gold stars. It had come from a scarf Carol had bought in Greece, on their honeymoon, from a vendor in a market whose name Carol couldn't remember anymore. The scarf had been expensive, too expensive really, and Carol had justified it by saying she'd wear it every day.

She hadn't, of course. It had lived in a drawer for years, taken out occasionally for special events, until one day Carol had noticed it was starting to fray at the edges and had quietly, without telling Helen, cut a generous square from the least damaged section and slipped it into the sewing trunk while Helen was at a meeting.

"Carol."

"I don't know what you're-"

"There are others." Helen was smiling now, a small, knowing smile that made Carol feel completely transparent. "The fabric from the curtains in our old apartment. The piece of that terrible Hawaiian shirt you made me throw away. The napkin from that restaurant in Taos the night you proposed."

"I didn't-"

"You did." Helen held up the burgundy square. "Did you think I wouldn't notice? That fabric just appearing in my trunk, always exactly the kind of thing I would have chosen, always from moments I might have forgotten to preserve myself?"

Carol had no defense. She'd been caught, thoroughly and completely, in an act of secret sentimentality that she would have denied under oath if anyone had asked.

"It's your project," she said finally. "I just... occasionally contributed."

"For twelve years."

"Sporadically."

"You hate this blanket."

"I don't hate the blanket. I mock the blanket. There's a difference." Carol pulled her knees tighter. "I mock the blanket because if I didn't, I'd have to admit that I find your deranged obsession with preserving scraps of fabric from every meaningful moment of our lives to be... not entirely without merit."

Helen's smile widened. "That might be the most romantic thing you've ever said to me."

"It wasn't romantic. It was a strategic admission designed to end this conversation."

"Too late. It's romantic now. I'm storing it in the romance vault. Right next to the time you cried at our wedding and tried to pretend it was allergies."

"It was allergies. There was a lot of pollen that day."

"It was October."

"Autumn pollen."

Helen laughed, the sound bright and warm in the morning quiet. Carol slid out of bed, crossing to where Helen knelt among her scattered squares, and lowered herself to the floor beside her.

"You really think you're going to finish it this time?"

"I have to." Helen was looking at the squares again, her expression shifting into something softer, more serious. "I've been thinking about it. About what it's for."

Carol waited. She knew this tone. This was Helen working up to something, circling the edges of a conversation they'd had before in fragments, in implications, in the spaces between words.

"It's supposed to be an heirloom," Helen said quietly. "That's what blankets like this are, in families. They get passed down. Grandmother to mother to daughter. Each generation adds their own squares, their own memories, until you have this... this layered thing, this history you can touch."

Carol's throat was tight. "Helen."

"I know we haven't decided anything. I know it's complicated-" Helen stopped, started again. "I know it's not simple. But I wanted to make something that could last. Something that could be passed down, if we ever had someone to pass it down to."

The room was very quiet. Carol could hear the distant sound of a car starting somewhere down the cul-de-sac, the hum of the air conditioner kicking on, the small sounds of a world that continued regardless of what was being said inside this room.

"The eggs," Carol said.

"I know."

"I haven't-" Carol stopped. The words were harder than she'd expected. "I haven't ruled it out. I know you think I have, but I haven't."

Helen's hand found hers, warm and steady.

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to. It's in the blanket, Helen. It's been in the blanket this whole time. Every square you've added, every year you've kept going - you're building something for someone who doesn't exist yet. You're making them a history before they even have a chance to make their own."

Helen was quiet for a long moment. Then she squeezed Carol's hand.

"I'm making something for us," she said. "For whoever we become. Whether that's two people or three or just us and a really overfed cat. The blanket doesn't have to mean anything more than what it is, a record. A proof that we were here, together, and it mattered."

Carol looked at the squares spread across the floor. The third date shirt. The wedding tablecloth. The ugly flannel from their first apartment. A hundred small moments, preserved in fabric, waiting to be stitched into something whole.

"Okay," she said.

Helen looked at her. "Okay?"

"Okay, you can finish the blanket. I'll even help. But I'm not learning how to sew. My hands are for typing and pointing accusingly at people who annoy me, not for delicate needlework."

"I wouldn't dream of asking."

"Good." Carol reached for the trunk, pulling out a piece of fabric she'd hidden there two months ago - a square of soft yellow wool from a sweater Helen had worn so often it had eventually disintegrated. "But you missed this one. It should go near the center."

Helen took the square, her eyes bright.

"You're a secret softie," she said. "You know that?"

"I'm a practical contributor to a household project. There's nothing soft about it."

"Keep telling yourself that."

Carol leaned over and kissed her, brief and firm, then stood and headed for the door.

"I'm making coffee," she said. "You have until I get back to organize that mess into something that doesn't look like a fabric store exploded."

"Yes, babe."

"Don't 'yes babe' me. I can hear the sarcasm from here."

But she was smiling as she walked down the stairs, and the image of Helen surrounded by pieces of their shared history stayed with her all the way to the kitchen, where she stood for a long moment with her hand on the coffee maker, not quite ready to press the button.

Seventeen squares to go.

Maybe, Carol thought, she could find a few more pieces before Helen noticed.

Just to help things along.

00D 11H 26M 27S

The blanket had never been finished.

Carol woke with the taste of whiskey still coating her tongue and a headache that felt like penance.

For a moment - one merciful, terrible moment - she didn't remember. The ceiling was the same ceiling she'd woken up to for nine years. The light filtering through the curtains had the pale grey quality of early dawn. Her body was heavy with the particular exhaustion that followed too much drinking and not enough sleep, and she thought, vaguely, that she should get up and make coffee before Helen started complaining about the time.

Then she turned her head.

Helen was in the hallway. Still in the same position Carol had left her in last night - or early this morning, time had stopped meaning anything somewhere around the third glass - after she'd carried her inside from that fucking truck with its ridiculous white horse on the hood. Or unicorn. Carol still wasn't sure which. She'd been too busy watching Helen die in her arms to examine the hood ornament closely, and now the detail felt like a splinter in her mind, something small and irritating that her brain kept returning to because the larger thing was too enormous to hold.

Helen had died in the bed of a stranger's truck, underneath a sky that didn't care, a whole nation that didn’t care. Not a dream.

Carol closed her eyes. Opened them again. Helen hadn't moved. Couldn't move. Would never move again, because Carol had felt the exact moment it happened, had felt Helen's weight shift from person to thing in her arms, had felt the absence arrive like a door slamming shut, and no amount of whiskey was going to undo that particular memory.

She sat up slowly. The living room floor had not been kind to her back, but she'd been unable to go upstairs last night. Unable to walk past Helen's body in the hallway to reach the bedroom they'd shared for nine years. Unable to do anything except find the whiskey and drink until the shaking stopped, curled on the floor like an animal hiding from a storm.

The bottle was empty beside her. She didn't remember finishing it.

The blanket.

The thought surfaced from somewhere deep, somewhere that still functioned despite everything. The blanket. Helen's blanket. The one that had been sitting unfinished in that cedar trunk for seventeen years, waiting for a future that wasn't coming anymore.

Carol stood. Her legs protested. Her head throbbed. She walked toward the stairs, and this time she made herself look at Helen as she passed - made herself see the stillness, the wrong angle of her limbs, the way her face had settled into something that wasn't peace, wasn't anything, was just gone.

"I'll be right back," Carol said.

The words hung in the empty hallway, obscene in their ordinariness.

The bedroom was exactly as they'd left it. Helen's sleeping mask on her nightstand. A half-empty glass of water she had forgotten to put in the dishwasher before leaving for the book tour. Back when everything had still been normal, when Carol hadn't known that normal was a finite resource she'd been spending without counting.

The sewing trunk still sat in the room, patient as always.

Carol knelt before it. Lifted the lid. The smell hit her first - cedar, lavender, something underneath that was just them - and she had to press her hand against her mouth to keep from making a sound.

She pulled out the blanket, spreading it across her lap, and counted.

Fifty-three squares.

Seventeen years of scraps and memories and Helen's stubborn insistence that their life together deserved to be preserved. The blue cotton from the third date shirt. The white linen from the wedding tablecloth. The ugly orange flannel from their first apartment. A hundred small moments, stitched together imperfectly, edges uneven because Helen had never quite mastered the hemming stitch.

Eleven squares short. Eleven gaps in a history that would never be complete.

Carol gathered the blanket in her arms and carried it downstairs.

Helen was still there. Of course she was still there. Carol knelt beside her in the hallway, on the floor Helen had picked out three years ago because she'd liked the color of the tile, and made herself look.

Helen's face was pale. Still. Emptied of everything that had made it Helen's face - the microexpressions, the almost-smile she got when Carol was being difficult, the way her eyebrows would lift just slightly when she was about to say something that would completely dismantle whatever argument Carol was constructing.

She looked like the mannequins. The thought arrived unbidden, unwelcome, and Carol couldn't push it away. Those wooden figures from the painting class, the ones she'd complained about for months - joints that didn't bend right, limbs that felt posed instead of lived-in, bodies that had never breathed or settled or gotten tired of holding still. They're wrong, she'd told Helen. They don't carry weight. They don't carry warmth. And Helen had offered herself as a reference instead, had sat bare in afternoon light and let Carol look - really look - because she understood that Carol couldn't paint something that didn't feel alive.

Now Helen was the mannequin. Stiff. Posed. A reference for something Carol would never be able to render, no matter how long she looked.

"I counted your squares," Carol said. Her voice came out rough, scraped raw. "Fifty-three. You were eleven short." She smoothed the blanket across her knees. "Seventeen years, Helen. Seventeen years of 'I'll finish it this weekend' and 'I just need to find the right fabric' and 'quality takes time.' And then you just-"

She stopped. Breathed.

"You just left. Without finishing. Without-"

Her hands were shaking. When had they started?

"I hid fabric in your trunk for twelve years. Did you know that? Of course you knew that. You knew everything. The burgundy silk from Greece. The napkin from Taos. That piece of the curtains from the old apartment that I told you I threw away." Carol touched Helen's cheek. Cold. So cold it didn't feel like skin anymore. "I was going to help you find the last eleven. I had ideas. That scarf from Denver. The pillowcase from Austin. I thought we had time, Helen. I thought…"

A sound escaped her. Something broken. Something that had been building since yesterday, since that fucking truck, since she'd felt Helen stop being Helen and start being a body she was holding.

Carol unfolded the blanket.

She started with Helen's feet, tucking the fabric around them carefully. Helen had always complained about cold feet. Had always stolen the covers, always pressed her freezing toes against Carol's calves in the middle of the night, always laughed when Carol yelped and threatened divorce.

She worked her way up. Legs. Hips. The soft stomach Carol had painted years ago in afternoon light, had spent hours studying because Helen had trusted her with it, had sat still and vulnerable and let Carol look. She wrapped the fabric around Helen's shoulders, around her arms, around the hands that had held Carol together for twenty-eight years.

When she reached Helen's face, Carol stopped.

"You know what the worst part is?" she said. "I actually liked your stupid blanket. All those years of mocking you, and I actually-" Her voice cracked. "I was proud of it. Of what you were building. I just couldn't say it, because that would mean admitting that I cared about something, and God forbid Carol Sturka have an emotion that isn't sarcasm or irritation."

The tears came then, sliding down her cheeks and landing on the blanket. On the third date shirt. On the wedding tablecloth. On so many countless moments Helen had refused to let disappear.

"I was supposed to go first," Carol whispered. "That was the deal. I'm the miserable one. I'm the one who drinks too much and hates everyone. You were supposed to outlive me by decades. Find someone nicer. Someone who actually said 'I love you' without making it sound like a complaint."

She pulled the blanket up, over Helen's chin, over her cheeks, over her closed eyes.

"There," Carol said, her hand resting on the blanket where Helen's heart used to beat. "Now you match the decor. Finally. You always said the hallway needed more color."

The joke fell flat in the silence, the way Carol's jokes always did when Helen wasn't there to laugh at them. Helen had laughed at everything, the good jokes, the bad jokes, the ones that weren't even jokes, just Carol being difficult because she didn't know how else to ask for attention.

Carol bent forward, pressing her forehead to the blanket, and let herself break.

The sounds that came out of her weren't crying - they were something older, something animal, the kind of grief that lived in the body rather than the mind. She shook with it. Gasped through it. Let it take her completely, because there was no one left to see, no one left to perform composure for, no one left who would understand that Carol Sturka crying on the floor of her own hallway was the most honest she'd been in years.

The sun rose fully while she stayed there, flooding the house with light. It caught the dust motes above Helen's body. Glinted off the photographs on the walls: two women in Greece, in Norway, in the garden of a house they'd bought because Helen had stood in the backyard and said I can see us here.

Carol stayed until her tears ran dry, her hand on Helen's chest, the morning light indifferent to everything it touched.

She thought about the first time they'd walked through this house - Helen's excitement, Carol's resistance, the slow and inevitable surrender that had become the pattern of their entire life together. Helen had always been the one pulling them forward. Into this house. Into their future. Into the terrifying possibility that Carol might actually be happy, if she could just stop fighting it long enough to notice.

Now there was no one left to pull.

No one left to make the next thing feel survivable.

Just Carol, alone on the hallway floor, holding onto a body wrapped in scraps of everywhere they'd been, with nowhere left to go.