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I: Her Bed as Inciting Incident
What had started as a pre-teen playdate of sorts for their sons had turned into late-night conversation, curled up barefoot on the couch in the next room while their kids watched a horror movie within earshot. Baran nurses a glass of white wine, a heavy pour, one knee tucked up under her chin as she sips, while Cassie lets her wine glass filled with sparkling water go flat (she doesn't care for the carbonation).
"You have a beautiful home," Cassie says, and she means it. She had pictured raising Harrison in this kind of place countless times. White picket fence, yard with an actual lawn, kitchen with an island, room to grow and grow up.
"It's too big for me," Baran says thoughtfully. She takes another sip of her wine. "And it's mostly just me. But I keep it mostly for my kiddo. Like a touchstone, you know?"
And Cassie does know. Her parents have this kind of house. She'd grown up in this kind of house, full of love. She isn't sure where she'd gone wrong, but it hadn't been with her parents, no. It hadn't been with her home.
"I like it better here with other people," Baran says. "I don't like sleeping here alone."
Cassie sees the invitation for what it is. "I can stick around tonight," she says, and takes a big gulp of her drink. The fizzing tickles her soft palate and nearly makes her cough.
"I'd like that," Baran says, and Cassie feels like she isn't saying something that she really, really wants to say.
They have to be quiet. Their kids are asleep in the living room down the hall, having opted for sleeping bags and piled up blankets in front of the TV instead of real beds.
"It's been awhile," Baran says, half-apologetic, her dark eyes thrown into even deeper relief in the weak light from the lamp on her bedside table.
"Don't I know it," Cassie agrees. She fumbles her chain into her mouth so it won't hit Baran in the face as she straddles her. She hopes she doesn't mind the tang of metal when they kiss.
Baran surprises herself by asking Cassie to cover her mouth while they fuck. When she opens her mouth to moan she feels the edges of her teeth pressing against the meat of Cassie's palm, biting at the muscle at the base of her thumb. She pokes her tongue out and feels a crease there; she thinks vaguely about middle school dabblings into palmistry, about lifelines.
She doesn't know what's more of a miracle: that's she's being touched, being deliciously fucked again after so long, or the aftermath, when Cassie falls asleep holding her, fingers still smelling like sex, and she doesn't have to sleep alone.
II: Her Bed as Desire
Cassie admits that she's always nursing a little bit of a crush on someone, always picturing what that someone might look like naked, tangled up in her sheets, warm and flushed in the afterglow of sex. Baran isn't jealous. She knows that Cassie is smart, that she's made all of her bad choices early and gotten them out of the way. She knows that those crushes are never serious and, although whatever they have might not be any more serious than another crush, at least it's real and realized.
"It's not the same thing," Cassie says, and it's like she's reading Baran's mind. "Most times it's fantasy. I want to be wanted and so I want other people. All the time. You're right here. You're in front of me and you want me back."
Baran admits to Cassie that when she's home alone, strange things happen. The stereo crackles to life on its own, playing songs from the 90s.
It's tearing me apart, Dolores O'Riordan lilts at top volume, until Baran has to rip the plug out of the wall, it's ruining everything.
The bathtub faucet opens and tries endlessly to fill the tub with cold water.
When she's home alone, and she knows that Cassie will be too, she always asks her to stay the night. Nothing ever happens when Cassie stays.
At least, nothing that feels like a haunting.
Cassie loves to wear a harness, loves the full-body thrust and smack of flesh meeting flesh. Baran prefers to use her hands, prefers being touched. But she'll suck on whatever Cassie puts into her mouth. She loves the way that Cassie looks at her when she does, mouth slightly open, like she's in awe.
III: Her Bed as Safe Haven
Cassie never sleeps well at Baran's place. This doesn't stop her from coming over again and again and again, with or without Harrison in tow. He stopped being an excuse a while ago for her to visit. Baran had offered her a spare key once, and she'd demurred, embarrassed, but she'd agreed at least to keep a spare toothbrush inside the medicine cabinet.
For all Baran complains about never sleeping, when she's sharing a bed with Cassie her sleep is a deep and immovable thing. She sleeps curled up into herself like she has something to shield. Cassie always feels the urge to wrap her arms around her, to add another protective layer.
The house is old, or, at least, it's older than Cassie's apartment unit. It creaks and complains with every temperature shift, every time there's an errant breeze. These sounds keep Cassie awake. Every floorboard resettling sounds like someone walking up the stairs. Every shadow seems to be hiding something.
"Oh, my house is definitely haunted," Baran had said the first time she'd stayed the night, and Cassie had laughed because it had seemed like a joke. But lately she isn't so sure.
There was a time when Cassie was like every other kid who thought hiding under her bedsheets could save her from monsters. Sometimes, now, when she feels a little afraid, she pulls the bedsheet over her head and Baran's, holds it up with one hand so it doesn't touch their faces. She imagines them both untouchable by whatever might lurk in Baran's house.
She can only ever manage this for a few minutes at a time before the air under the sheet starts to feel stale and suffocating.
IV: Her Bed as Confessional
"What are you afraid of?" Baran asks. She's propped herself up on one elbow so she can look Cassie in the eyes. She's also naked, which is incredibly distracting. Cassie can never not marvel at the myriad little differences between their bodies: colours and freckles and stretch marks and scars. She has the constant urge to catalogue everything with her fingertips.
"It's been a long time since I've been this serious," Cassie says finally. "I don't know if can do that again."
Baran nods and tries not to show how her heart is sinking. "It doesn't have to be serious," she says. "I just don't want to spend my nights alone."
Cassie sucks in a deep breath and lets it out slowly. "I only say it because I feel like this could be serious. I feel like I'm already more than just a warm body."
"I'm not asking for anything more than that," Baran says, and she pulls her knees up so that they're touching Cassie's legs. Her skin is always a little bit cooler than Cassie's; she always seems to be siphoning away a little bit of her body heat.
"I'm not asking for anything else," she says again, and Cassie lets her press her body closer.
V: Her Bed as Practical Joke
At some point the boys decide that the idea of a ghost in the house is funny. They move things — floor lamps, and coffee tables, and trash bins — by mere inches so that they're never quite where they're expected to be. They write ominous messages in the condensation in the bathroom mirror. They leave twigs and fallen leaves in Baran's bed.
Cassie always rolls her eyes as she puts everything back in place, as she wipes the mirror clean and changes the bed sheets. She knows where to find everything she needs without asking.
"They're just kids," she tells Baran. But she can tell that Baran is unnerved. She's never seen her look so unraveled.
"I just want this place to feel like a home," she says, and something deep in Cassie's chest aches a little.
"I'll make sure they stop," she promises.
The kids swear they will.
Later on, when Baran reports that strange things keep happening it's hard to tell if they'd lied.
VI: Her Bed as Home
Baran crawls back into bed midday, despite the sun pouring through the windows like butterscotch. Despite the plans they'd made to be outside. Cassie doesn't question it, but concern pinches deep in her belly.
So she brings Baran a warm mug of tea and climbs into bed next to her.
"What if there are no ghosts?" Cassie says softly.
Baran frowns. "I don't think I'm imagining this," she says.
"I don't think you are, either." Cassie agrees readily. But she's only ever seen and heard things that she can explain. She has to let herself wonder because senses, after all, can be fooled. All because she doesn't notice the things that Baran describes, it doesn't mean that it isn't real.
"I know nothing bad has happened yet," Baran says. She presses her palms against her mug, lets it warm her skin. "But I just always feel like something is about to happen. It only feels okay when you're here."
"Hey," Cassie says, and her voice catches a little in her throat. She doesn't know the right thing to say. She climbs behind Baran and wraps her arms around her. She makes a cage with her body, not to hold Baran in; rather, to keep everything else from reaching her. Baran leans into her and Cassie presses her face into her neck.
"I've got you," she says against Baran's skin. She doesn't know what exactly she means by this yet, but she believes that she's telling the truth. She just doesn't know what shape that truth will need to take today, or tomorrow, or the next day. It scares her a little bit, the idea of calling this bed hers, even if, at this point, she spends more time in this bed than her own. She's bleeding rent on a home she doesn't live in anymore.
If someone were to ask Cassie what exactly she's so scared of, she wouldn't be able to find the right words to explain. At least she understands Baran's fear of being alone. At least that's something that she knows how to solve, that she's pretty sure she wants to solve.
"I've got you," she says again, punctuating with the softest kiss. Baran sets down her tea and turns her face to find Cassie's mouth, to kiss her harder, and as she does, Cassie's already thinking about which rooms might have room for her stuff and Harrison's. She's thinking about what she could live without to stay here as long as she's needed. She surprises herself when she realizes that the answer is: she doesn't need that much at all. There's so much already here.
The sun throws a sticky bright square of light across them both. The way it refracts in Baran's eyes brightens them so they're honey-warm and full of the exact feeling that Cassie's afraid to name. She'll never say it out loud, even to herself, but it looks a little something like love.