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“I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time” Oona breathes, voice still caught on the edge of a sob, and the words land heavy and warm in Ramona’s chest, but her brain is much too slow and much too occupied with Oona’s mouth, which is now back to sliding gently over hers - Oona’s hands bracketing her face - Oona’s hips solidly pushing into hers - oh god, she’s kissing Oona - to do much about that.
At least, not until several minutes later (has it been minutes? Hours? If this is the last and only thing Ramona ever does in her life, she’ll die utterly and completely content, honestly it might be why she dies in the first place), when Ramona pulls away to catch her breath. Oona immediately starts to press the most delicate of kisses to her cheeks, the bridge of her nose, the corner of her mouth, because it’s really too much to ask of her right now for her to stop kissing her in some capacity, to show her devotion in some way. Oona’s hands are back to cradling her face for now, having spent the last unknown duration of time touching as much of Ramona as they could, tangling themselves into her hair, stroking the back of her neck, moving down her sides to grip onto her waist. Sticking chastely to over her shirt, for now - Oona has been thinking of this for far too long to jump the gun -
(She’d promised herself, when she let herself to indulge in her most secret, most tender of hopes, always when she was tucked deep into her bed at night, feeling the waves gently rock the houseboat in the quiet stillness. She’d stay awake, turning over each moment spent with Ramona that day over and over in her head. Thinking of how Ramona’s eyes shone whenever she threw one of her smiles at her, and the way the sunlight had glimmered off her soft hair, hair that she knows always smells faintly of coconuts from her shampoo no matter the amount of lakewater in it, that heart-clenchingly adorable noise she made when Oona dunked her under the water, the way she looked coming out of the lake, water droplets making their way torturously down her collarbone, how soft and warm her cheek had been when she pressed a kiss to it when they were saying goodnight - those kinds of thoughts that made it impossible to not indulge, to not torture herself with the hope of a maybe, possibly, perhaps, someday. She’d promised herself, in those most vulnerable of moments, that if by some miracle Ramona ever returned her feelings, she’d take it slow. Ramona was so, so special. She couldn’t risk her ever thinking that she was simply another notch on her bedpost, as opposed to the reason why Oona was driven to distract herself with mindless flings, so that she could bear to continue living with the aching hurt of wanting something she was certain she could never have).
Ramona’s breathing evens out slightly - not by much, she still has Oona pressed against her, crowding her into the side of the house, for god’s sake, she may never breathe properly ever again - and it is only then that she has enough oxygen back into her brain for it to start catching up to what has just happened, what Oona said. I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time.
“How - how long?” Ramona manages to stutter out.
Oona makes a confused sound, her own brain similarly having been occupied with trying not to burn up from the simple fact that she now knows what Ramona tastes like, the stuttered tiny gasps she makes when Oona sucks on her bottom lip, how it feels to allow herself to hold her sweet little face in her hands properly and more purposefully than the brief touches she used to allow herself when emphasising some sarcastic, flirty joke or other, for it to follow Ramona’s thought process at the moment. She has started to kiss down the sharp slope of Ramona’s jaw, and why is Ramona even making normal human noises at the moment, can’t she see Oona is busy -
But Ramona is now (finally) registering her words, and it’s too much for her to dare let herself believe that she isn’t just Oona’s fixation of the week, and she desperately wants to know. “You said - ahh - how long have you wanted to do this?” She tries again, her words low and tripping over themselves in the stillness of the night around them, affected by the migration of Oona’s attentions down her neck. Her hands push at Oona’s chest very slightly, not enough to indicate that she wants this to stop, just that she wants Oona’s attention.
It’s enough to drag Oona out of the sluggish pool of want and heat and bone-deep relief and love where she’d been doing the backstroke for the past several moments, and she opens her eyes to meet Ramona’s, reading the vulnerability mixed with the evident happiness in them, recognises the genuine, desperate question in them.
(Oona likes to think that she is the expert in their circle at reading Ramona, that no one else is privy to knowing the intricacies of this precious, guarded girl like she is. Others may be warranted in rolling their eyes and scoffing at this notion, given that Ramona has been throwing the biggest of heart eyes at her for so long, has been visibly choking down the stabs of jealousy anytime Oona has so much as mentioned another girl, has been in the literal lesbian trenches all of this summer, and Oona had been none the wiser until a few days ago, actually. But others are not here, so we’ll have to let Oona believe in her own delusions for now.)
“I - years?” Oona says, almost as if she’s not sure how this is even in question.
Ramona blinks up at her, once, twice, three times. “Uh, years? What? How-” she sputters, in shocked disbelief. Oona cocks her head - that singular devastating motion that she likes to throw at Ramona whenever she teases her, that motion that is so achingly her, and what does she mean that Ramona could have been trailing her fingers over her cheek when she does so all this time, what the actual fuck -
“Uh…Yeah? I thought you knew?” Ramona’s brows momentarily draw down into her signature disgruntled expression, and Oona is finally, finally catching up to the truth, and oh -
“Oh”, Oona manages out loud. “You really didn’t know?”
Ramona lets out one of her high pitched noises, which Oona takes to mean ‘bitch nuh-huh’, and continues rapidly; “Oh yeah, I could so totally tell given all the times you didn’t tell me, you absolute ass-“ But Oona knows there’s no heat behind the sarcasm, because Ramona is still flushed from their kissing, still holding onto her face like it’s the one thing keeping her grounded, and she hasn’t actually stopped smiling at her pretty much this whole entire time actually.
“Um, I guess - I guess we have a lot to, uh, talk about huh, baby…” And Oona doesn’t know why she’s stuttering so much, just from the way that Ramona is looking up at her, mouth swollen red and her hands still cupping her face, oh so gently. She wasn’t even this nervous after her first kiss. She’s always been confident when it came to girls, but being this close to Ramona has her brain flailing, barely able to string one coherent thought with another, her usual suaveness wildly out of her own reach.
Not that Ramona has given any notice to the fact that Oona’s speech patterns have regressed back by several grades, because Oona’s always been very liberal with her touches and her pet names, and it’s not like she hasn’t called her babe a million times over, and everyone else for that matter, but she’s never called her baby, and she’s never heard her say it to anyone else either, and she wants to hear her say it over and over and over again, wants to make her say it, because Ramona is making her feel too good for her to be able to say anything else, and, and - that thought has Ramona rocking up on her tiptoes again, pulling Oona’s face back towards her, pressing her lips back to hers. And would you look at that, it’s still just as perfect, it wasn’t just the novelty of a first kiss, and oh god she may never be able to do anything that isn’t kissing Oona ever again, no one can make her, fight her -
Oona reciprocates eagerly, pressing even deeper into her, licking along Ramona’s bottom lip, hands digging into her waist, and oh fuck, Ramona meets her where she’s at, opening up for her, and Oona licks into her mouth eagerly, smugly delighting in the delicious whine she elicits. Oona’s upper hand is quickly lost though when Ramona winds one hand behind her neck, carding her fingers through the fine hair at the back of her neck, sending a shiver down her spine, and with her other hand tugs assertively at her collar, making Oona stumble into her and bringing her somehow even closer.
And this time it’s Oona that lets out the smallest of moans, because she always suspected that the younger girl’s relative romantic inexperience would not mean that she’d be passive, given the chance (and she’s thought about it…a lot). Ramona has the strongest presence of anyone she knows (“You have such big dick energy babe”, she had teasingly told her more than once, laughing at the embarrassed blush that spreads over Ramona’s face), and to already see glimpses of that underlying firmness has her knees buckling, folding into the shorter girl even further. And Oona knows down to her very bones that her usual approach of taking the initiative and setting the pace with all the women she’s been with will mean all of jack shit in the face of everything Ramona, and who is she to complain when Ramona is still insistently pulling her in by her collar, still kissing her urgently, as if this is the only thing that matters to her in the world, as if Oona is the only thing that matters, and she loses herself into it yet again, letting her brain and body swim with it all, until -
A loud hooting noise startles the both of them apart, and for the briefest of seconds they stare wildly about, breaths coming out short and jagged from a mixture of fright, but mostly because it’s been several minutes of making out like the horny teenagers that they both are, despite all the heavy baggage on their shoulders. They both realise at the same time that it was only an owl, and they grin at each other bashfully, letting out quiet giggles that break the tension that has stretched taut between them for the past, well, several days, really. Her chest still heaving somewhat, Oona realises how dark it has gotten, notices from the sounds of the nightlife around them that night has well and truly set in, and also that they had been in the middle of a conversation before they got distracted again.
She brings her hands up to once again hold Ramona’s face, the silver of her rings cool against her flushed cheeks, swiping her thumb gently over the arc of her delicate cheekbones, finding it impossible to not grin at the look of want and awe that still shines through in the other girl’s eyes.
“So…wanna go inside? We should really talk about this a bit more, yeah?”, Oona asks, gesturing vaguely between them.
Ramona nods, but then raises an inquisitive eyebrow. “Ok, yeah, I’d like to talk, definitely…but then, uh… more kissing?” She asks, tone still unsure, as if she doesn’t know whether she can push her luck, whether she can ask for this.
“Oh, try and stop me, ‘Mona”, she replies, voice low and dripping with want, and finally it seems like she’s gotten a handle back on things because she’s able to say it with her normal confidence, and that’s enough to set Ramona’s heart racing again, has her gaze dipping to Oona’s mouth, has her reaching out to once again to bring her closer.
Oona giggles at this, a soft, delighted sound that she’s only ever made around her best friend, who brings out the softest parts of her. She gently angles away, instead pressing another soft kiss to Ramona’s cheek, and brushes her fingers down her arm to take her hand. “Come on, you gay horn dog, let’s go inside. You know the mosquitos are drawn to your pasty Canadian skin more than my superior European blood, and you’re going to regret staying outside any longer tomorrow”. She winks at her, and makes sure that she’s clear in that she only wants to re-locate, not stop this wondrous development, by raising Ramona’s hand and pressing a kiss to the back of it.
“Yeah, yeah, fine let’s go inside” Ramona retorts, finally managing to do the seemingly impossible and turns away from Oona, fishing out her house key from her shorts in the process.
They make their way inside, and Ramona hits the light switch, turning back to look at the other girl. She can see her better now in the soft orange light that has filled the living room. She runs her eyes over her, taking in her rumpled clothes, her messy hair, her flushed cheeks, her kiss-swollen lips, her eyes that still look blown and, frankly, lustful - and she feels a delicious, hot twinge deep inside of her at knowing that it’s finally her that’s made Oona look utterly debauched. Has her thinking back to all the other times she’s seen Oona look somewhat like this, dragging some girl or other by the hand out from behind some bushes at camp or the bathroom at a party, and the agonizing jealousy that would fill her. Which reminds her - I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time - and, yeah, she definitely wants to talk (and she definitely, definitely, wants a lot more kissing after).
For one terrible moment Ramona feels awkward, doesn’t know what to do with her hands, how to stand, what to do - but then Oona reaches out for her again, takes her hand and squeezes gently, meets her eyes, and gives her the usual soft smile she’s always given her, especially when it’s just them. And, right, it’s Oona, her best friend in the whole world, her person, she knows how to be around her, it’s the most herself she feels, and Ramona calms.
“Want some hot chocolate?” she asks, going for their standard sleepover beverage of choice out of instinct. For all the alcohol, the cigarettes, the joints that they’ve increasingly turned to over the years, especially with life getting all the more complicated, it’s them, and this is definitely going to be a sleepover, with Maple away at camp and Annie out late for her party, and this is what they do when they sleepover. They have hot chocolate and they talk about everything and nothing in between, kicking each other’s ankles under the table, or pressed up together on the couch, or tangled up in the same bed - but always, always touching in some way or another.
Oona nods, and follows her to the kitchen. Eventually, the hot chocolate gets made, although admittedly, with several more fits and starts then it’s ever taken Ramona to make it, given that she’s finding out that tasks are extraordinarily more difficult to accomplish when she has a hot girl draping herself over her, kissing the back of her neck, the slope of her jaw, kissing, kissing, kissing.
“Who’s the gay horn dog now?” Ramona sasses, and Oona accepts the title proudly, shrugging her shoulders.
“Can you blame me baby? Have you seen you?” is the matter of fact response, and Ramona doesn’t know yet how to accept these compliments from her, so she just looks at her feet and blushes (although technically speaking, her face hasn’t been her normal colour since the first brush of Oona’s lips against hers). Oona notices, and smiles. “Come on, let’s go sit down, my knees are still feeling a bit weak from all of this.” And god if that doesn’t set off another round of tumultuous butterflies in the pits of Ramona’s stomach, how is this even real life?
She follows her friend to the couch, handing her her mug of hot chocolate (and it is her mug, the blue and yellow one with the wonky handle and the accidental paint splatters that she’d made for her at a ceramics class one summer when she was ten and Oona eleven, all knobbly knees and still the same height, Oona sporting braces and Ramona a truly unfortunate fringe that perhaps had she had more adults in her life that weren’t slightly grumpy old men would have been avoided).
For another moment, Ramona flusters again - should she sit somewhat apart from her? Is it too presumptuous to sit down right next to a girl who has just kissed you silly pressed up against the wall of your house? But then - right, she has to keep telling herself - this is her best friend. They haven’t had anything remotely resembling a single physical boundary between them since the day they met, mostly at Oona’s insistence and to none of Ramona’s resistance.
She settles herself down next to her, turning to sit criss-crossed facing Oona, who mimics her position, knees touching, and Ramona tries not to lose her mind over the fact that they’ve sat like this countless times to talk, it’s one of her favourite things to just yap with her best friend about anything and nothing, but this time her lips are still tingling from the feel of the other girl’s mouth on hers. Oona is looking at her with her big blue eyes and face so open to her gaze over the steam rising slowly over the lip of the mug, and she’s actually not imagining things or reading into it for once, but Oona really is looking down at her as if she personally hung the moon. Ramona’s never been as confident in reading Oona as the other girl is of her own abilities in reading her, but even she is not blind enough to not notice the sheer depth of the fondness in them as she looks at her, to not accurately read the mingled happiness and attraction in them as they flicker between her eyes and her lips.
(In this case, others will sadly agree that Ramona has never been the best at reading the truth in Oona’s face when it comes to her - or even really any good at it - ok, so she’s absolutely crap at it. Like how Oona’s eyes always seek her out first when she meets up with the group, or look at her when she cracks a joke to see if she’s made her smile. Or that brief one-week period when Ramona had had a small crush on a fellow camper one summer when she was 13, which had culminated in awkwardly holding her hand on the way back to the bunks after campfire, and then her rushed first kiss in the darkness - and how Oona spent that entire week moody and irritable, which Ramona had chalked up to PMS. And how she didn’t connect that with the suddenly increased interest from Oona’s end in seeking out other girls, first to just flirt a little with at town events, but increasingly to do more… Or how nervous Oona had been when asking her out to the movies just a few days ago, keeping her face carefully blank when she was not teasing her, before her doubts and her sister’s/the voice at the back of her head had looped You’re doing it already. Breaking her heart over and over and over in her head till she felt like she wanted to rip her own heart out rather than risk continuing to hurt her best friend. Because of course she’ll hurt her, Oona is not good enough for her, cannot possibly hope to be. Or how - and unfortunately, neither of them know this yet - in a few weeks time she will again keep her face so still, so detached, an almost literal mask, as she breaks her own heart out of desperately not wanting to become the leaded weight tying Ramona to this place, dragging her down into further misery. But anyway, that’s yet to come.)
(If it helps others in any way, she’ll get better at reading Oona. After that devastating separation is finally over, after they learn to communicate better, after therapy, tears, and reunions, after coming back together, after re-learning how to trust each other and in the love they share, over and with time, she’ll get better at it. She’ll have years - an entire lifetime - to practice. But again, that’s still yet to come, and neither of them know this yet.)
But for now, Ramona is still slowly allowing herself to delight in the look that Oona is giving her, that’s making her heart beat faster even though she’s not touching her anymore so than usual.
“So…” Oona drawls, stretching out the word in the way that is so uniquely hers. “That was, like, the best thing ever.” She had aimed for cheeky, for her usual flirtatious tone, but instead it ended up landing as oddly confessional, with no hint of a joke.
“Yeah.” Ramona nods effusively, her own attempt at acting cool and sounding like hot girls often have her seeing stars on her porch actually, no big deal whatsoever, landing just as bare and honest between them. Neither of them mind, though, recognising that it’s one of those moments when their walls can fall away and they can just talk openly, moments that have been frequent in their years of friendship but now feels all the more sacred.
“No notes. 10/10 would definitely do again” Oona continues, still trying to ease herself into the conversation.
Ramona opens her mouth to shoot off a quick retort, before a strange look crosses her face, a sort of ‘oh, right’ look, and instead leans in to steal a quick peck.
“You better do again.” She says with a smile. But she’s now too curious to not press the matter further. “Ok, but about all these years of wanting to kiss me that you’ve mentioned…”
Oona mock groans and winces theatrically. “Nooooo” she whines, as she goes to cover her face with her free hand. “Don’t make me, it’s embarassingggg”.
Ramona can’t help the happy giggle that comes out of her at her antics. “Oh come on, I’ve literally just made an entire fool of myself for the past few weeks, I’m sure the whole Stacy Mallory thing has been way more embarrassing for me than whatever it is that you’re hiding!” - and despite her playful pout, she still can’t help but bite out the other girl’s name with an edge of mocking resentment.
Oona looks at her again, and heaves a deep sigh, as if preparing herself for the tortuous unburdening of her deepest secrets (which, to be fair, she is). “Ok ok, fine! But only if we can get straight back to kissing like, really soon”, she winks and waggles her eyebrows at her for effect, and this time her attempt at flirting lands square and true, with Ramona flushing once again and feeling the promise of good things a-comin pool like molten heat in the pit of her stomach.
Satisfied for the moment, Oona reaches out to hold her hand, taking another sip of the cooling hot chocolate to stall and get her thoughts in order. “So I guess, um. I’ve had a massive crush on you for like what? Four? Five years? Actually uh, to be honest, the whole coming out process and realising I liked you went hand in hand for me. I just, um, did not tell you about the crush on you part”
Ramona blinks slowly at her, mouth hanging slightly open (she’s aware that she must look gormless, but sue her, you can act all put together when the love of your life confesses that you were her gay awakening, get off her back).
“What? But…but you never said anything! The fuck Oona, that’s so uncool!”
“Excuse you miss ma’am, did I miss all the grand declarations of lo- of your romantic intentions on your end?”
Ramona winces and huffs out a laugh at that, “Ok fair, but I mean come on, you were trying to sleep with any woman that blinked in your direction, and you never so much as made a move on me, what was I supposed to think?”
It’s Oona’s time to wince at that. “Yeah uh…it’s just…for a while there, I was kind of just waiting to see if you’d even be into girls, ya know? Since I’m of course so much older and wiser.” Ramona pulls a mocking face at her, the frequent reminders that Oona is a year older a common thread of their friendship. “So when you did come out eventually, that summer when I was about 14? I think? I thought like, maybe we’ll grow into something, you know? But like, even then I knew that if we did, it would be a big something, and it was a way too scary to consider immediately, so I just…tried to go with the flow, see whether you even had a crush on me back.”
Ramona flashes back to that year after she came out to Oona, which she had let slip casually over a binge watch of Wynona Earp. Thinks back to the increasing butterflies she’d get in the pit of her stomach when Oona laughed. How she’d stay up at night, thinking of different ways that she could prove her dedication and love to Oona, like maybe rescuing her from an almost-drowning in the lake and showing off her impressive boat driving skills in the process, or maybe stepping in to selflessly take care of her if she ever got sick whilst her mother was on one of her weeks-long getaways with whoever she was dating at the time. Increasingly realising that making up dramatic scenarios involving your best friend to show her you love her is probably not the straightest, most platonic of behaviours. Then, when summer rolled around, during their annual trip to camp, when that girl from Ontario, a year older than Ramona, had made it clear that she liked her, and, well…
She shoots a bashful look at Oona, who reads it for the acknowledgment that it is, and doesn’t pause in her story. “And then, I guess I figured that we could both just date other people casually for a while, just to figure things out, grow up a bit first, yeah? But at that point I still thought you know, maybe someday soon, maybe I’d ask you out and see what happens…”
“So what happened? Why didn’t you?”
“Well. Uh. That was the summer before- well, before…” and Ramona knows she means before Gordon got really sick, before they stopped popping over to Sterling Point every chance they got and she holed herself up in Barrie instead, measuring her time in school days and in doctors’ appointments.
“I thought I might. I mean, I was nervous as hell, and it’s famously super easy to tell your best friend you’d love to jump her bones actually.” Ramona laughs - boy does she know a thing or two about that.
“And that summer, remember? We spent so much time together. I think we barely slept apart a couple of days of the week, and sometimes you’d look at me, and I’d think maybe, and I…”
Ramona finds herself leaning forward, almost as if she’s waiting for the next twist of a story, even though it’s her own past she’s hearing, and she was there and all.
“Yeah?” She encourages breathlessly.
“Then…then my mum left. And you remember how I was…”
And Ramona does. Oona and Mapel’s mother had always been flighty and prone to flakiness. She’d carted her daughters around three countries before semi-settling in Muskokwa, which she only did because she was chasing one of her boyfriends back to his home. After he eventually left the picture, her mother still defined her (and their) lives by whoever she was dating at the time. Thankfully, the houseboat was too small for them to be a real presence in their day-to-day life, but the lack of space meant that she’d often leave herself. The older Oona grew, and the more their mother felt like she’d be able to take care of her sister alone, the more often she’d leave them on their own. First a day here, then a weekend there, until eventually every couple of months or so she’d leave a couple hundred bucks on the dining room table for food and tell them she was off on some romantic getaway with her current flame.
And then, that summer, she had gotten into a relationship that was intense even for her standards, and when that went to shit, something in her mother had just…broken. She spent weeks holed up in bed, refusing to get up, to go to work, with Oona already old enough to worry about what that meant for them, about the growing pile of bills on the table. And then, one day, she seemed to get back up, return to her old self, but the relief was short lived. It turned out that her mother had gotten into some online community of like-minded women, and she started waxing lyrical about how she needed to break cycles and become the best her, and that she needed to travel to do it. And that’s when she told them she’d be going on her live love laugh tour to India, would continue working some remote customer service job to do so and still pay the bills for them (well, mostly). But yeah. India. Oona had been just shy of seventeen. And suddenly, for all intents and purposes, she’d become a single mother overnight. She’d went from girl-with-flaky-mother to girl-who-got-left-behind, and something deep and vulnerable inside of her had irrevocably and permanently shattered.
Ramona remembers that period all too well. Oona hadn’t dropped off the map, not exactly. She still picked up shifts at Sully’s mums’ cafe, still helped out the marina crew when she needed extra cash - although now she did so not to have spare cash to feed her jewelry and vintage T collection, but because at the back of her mind, she was worried about what would happen if her mum just, stopped sending money. She still showed up at most of her hangs. She was still her boisterous, chaotic self - if not more so, as if she was amping it up to put on a show of normality. But Ramona knew her deeper than that, and a wall had been put up, a wall that she didn’t really know how to climb over. All she knew was that her best friend was hurting, deeply, and was doing so whilst feeling the responsibility of making sure that her sister followed a routine and ate something beyond cereal and sweets. But also - Ramona had her own shit to deal with, listening to Gordon’s hacking cough wake him up in the middle of the night, listening to the rattle of his breath as he went about simple tasks like making them dinner, listening to him having muffled conversations with Joe on the phone in his bedroom, conversations that she couldn’t hear but could sense the urgent tone of. Listening, knowing in her heart of hearts that someday soon she would hear something truly terrible.
Perhaps if there had been more time, more space for it, Ramona could have eventually found the way to help Oona with the hurt of it all. Perhaps if she had been older, more mature, she’d have realised that leaving her too, so soon after her mother, would break her best friend’s heart. But life had never pretended to be fair on her, and she was just a kid. And just a few short weeks later, she woke up to Gordon coughing so much that he couldn’t breathe. What followed was one of the worst nights of her life, bundling him up quickly onto their boat, speeding towards the mainland, calling ahead to the ambulance so they could be waiting at the shore, unknowingly repeating the same, final journey her mother and not-father had taken some fifteen years ago. And then, about a half dozen doctors and even more tests later, they told her that there was no getting better, only managing it, only making him comfortable.
And Ramona - she just couldn’t deal with it all. With spending every spare moment trying to make sure the man who raised her was indeed as comfortable as he could be for the last months of his life. Organising the carers’ shifts around her school hours so that there was someone to keep an eye on him, to feed him and bathe him, when she needed to be at school. She had meant to call, at first, she really did, meant to do more than occasionally answer Joe’s messages with a perfunctory ‘We’re fine’ to let the people back at Sterling Point know she was alive. But… even now, she doesn’t really know how to explain why she shut everyone and everything out so completely. She turned off the notifications on her phone, would rarely go on social media, never opened her messages, because then there’d be more things to deal with on top of it all, dealing with the guilt of leaving so suddenly, of not reaching out, even as the loneliness of it all was threatening to crush her. Ramona wasn’t stupid, and she knew what she was feeling, had read enough to know she had slipped into a depression, but for all her books and survival instincts she didn’t know how to just…stop. It was all she could do on most days to shower, go to school, do her homework at Gordon’s bedside when she came back, and she was only doing that because she knew Gordon would worry if she didn’t, and he had enough to be getting on with.
Ramona realises she’s been silent for a few moments, looking down at her hand still intertwined with Oona’s, rubbing absentmindedly at the metal of one of the other girl’s rings. Oona says nothing for a while, knowing that talking about what happened a year ago is difficult on both of them. Knows that now is not the time to dig deeper into those emotions, for either of them.
“So yeah. When I didn’t hear from you, when you didn’t answer any of my messages on anywhere, or the postcard I sent, I just… it was hard, you know? I know it was harder for you, but on my end I…I figured, if you liked me, as more than a friend, then you would have called at some point. After a few months, I wasn’t even sure you’d ever come back. We didn’t even hear immediately when Gordon - when he - we just heard from Joe because his lawyers got in touch, after.”
Ramona listens to Oona with her eyes downcast, unable to meet her eyes, unable, still to offer any explanation, feeling herself retreat back into that dark space she goes to when she thinks of the last year. This time though, Oona notices.
“Hey, look at me baby.” She says, quietly, gently lifting her face with a finger under her chin, making her meet her gaze. “It’s ok, we don’t have to talk about it any longer. I get it more now, I know you didn’t mean to hurt any of us specifically. And you’re back now, yeah?” Ramona nods at that, cautiously, still squirming a bit at the first real indication from Oona of how much she unintentionally hurt her whilst stuck in her own hurt.
“And for what it’s worth, I am sorry I didn’t realise before how bad it was for you, how badly you needed me. I should have just - shown up at your door, knocked some sense into you, kept you company. Instead I just - threw myself into work and school and whoever was around to keep me distracted from the fact that you had left, how much I missed you, and it became a difficult habit to break, I guess.” Oona feels raw and vulnerable, having never gotten this close to the heart of the matter of it all. Even now, still, she can't really tell her the extent to which the past year had crushed her. Ramona had left, not even a full season after her mother had left her, and in her head, it just solidified that that’s just the way it goes. That flings and keeping everyone at arm’s length was better than the alternative, than getting her heart broken when people decided to leave her behind. That if Ramona loved her in the same way that she did, she would have never have abandoned her so completely, with no notice, in the first place.
(It will take some months yet for Oona to start realising that two things can be true at once, and that sometimes life doesn’t work in a binary. Ramona could love her, completely, and she could still leave, because sometimes it just wasn’t about her. But also - Ramona could come back. Ramona would always come back to her. And Ramona will learn how to not shut her out when things get too hard. When old patterns threaten to make her want to bolt to somewhere where she can just not have to deal with other people. And eventually, they’ll stop breaking each other’s hearts over it.)
A stretched silence falls between them. Ramona doesn’t have the words yet to fully explain herself (it would take a lot of fancy New York therapy before she’s able to verbalise this part of her life in any constructive way). So instead, she decides to change the subject.
“Remember that time when I was fourteen and we went down to the mainland because we were bored? We had found that secondhand bookstore I like, the one next door to the pizza place?” Oona nods, trying to follow the drastic change in conversation, although by now familiar enough with her best friend’s deflection tactics to know this was her way of saying that that part of the conversation is over, for now.
“We spent like, an hour in the store, and I only had ten bucks on me, and I couldn’t decide which books to buy. And I hadn’t seen you for a few minutes, and suddenly you came to find me at the back, and you just like, thumped me over the head with a book, and you were like, ‘come on dummy, I bought you this one so you can stop agonising over it, and you can buy another one with your own cash, because I really want to go get pizza’” Oona nods again, a slight confused frown still on her face. She remembers that day, although vaguely, it wasn’t like they had done anything wildly out of the ordinary. “I just remember looking at the book you bought me, and looking at you, feeling so…cherished, because you’d noticed I couldn’t decide what to buy, and you went and got me a book that you knew I’d like without me even having to tell you I wanted it. It’s still one of my favourites, I think I’ve read it at least 20 times. And I just remember like, feeling like I wanted to throw up my own heart, because it just hit me then, you know? How much I really, really liked you. How much I wanted to spend as much time as possible with you, just us two. And you just upended my whole life in the middle of a bookstore and you had no idea and I wanted to tear my own hair out, honestly -”
And Oona grins at that, the tension from earlier dissipating. “Yeah?” she breathes out, almost giddy with the relief that actually, it hadn’t been one-sided this whole time.
Ramona shrugs, a pained, embarrassed smile on her face. “Yeah. I remember getting this almost overwhelming urge to just, like, grab you and kiss you in the middle of the bookstore, but I was too scared, I guess.”
A mischievous grin spreads over Oona’s face. “Oh really? And what would you have done had you actually gone through with it then?” she teases. And Ramona understands the current underneath the words, the unspoken invitation.
“Oh I don’t know, maybe like -” but the rest of the words are lost, as both of them have leaned in at the same time, lips meeting again after what both consider to have been way too long of a time. Oona pulls away just long enough to take the long-abandoned mug out of Ramona’s hand, putting the both of them down on the table next to them, before Ramona grabs her shirt and pulls her in again - and really, Oona cannot get used to this, how the shorter girl keeps manhandling her with just the tiniest of tugs, but she’s finding that she’s absolutely unable to put up any resistance to it whatsoever, and she’d let Ramona push her around all her livelong days if she followed it up with kissing her exactly like this.
And then, Oona discovers what a heart attack probably feels like, as Ramona decides to clamber on top of her, pushing her back into the back of the couch, legs coming down on either side of her hips, and oh my god Ramona is fucking straddling her, what the fuck. Her brain might actually be melting out of her ears. She swears she has never felt this good in her life, not even a single one of her hookups has ever come remotely close to this feeling, and she thinks she may never move from this position, ever, will let Ramona kiss her and kiss her and kiss her like this forever.
(She will move, eventually, but only after the press of their mouths becomes slower and more languid, as their limbs grow heavy with exhaustion from the long day, threatening to have them pass out uncomfortably piled on top of each other on the couch. They’ll make their way up to Ramona’s room, change and brush their teeth the way they’ve always done before any sleepover. They’ll clamber into her bed, more clumsily than usual. And they’ll eventually fall asleep tangled up in each other, tired but content down to their very marrow, and for the first time, but certainly by far not the last, their routine goodnight comes with a soft, sweet, toothpaste-y kiss.)