#too afraid to put this on the main tags 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉

[drywallwords]

…Maybe, then, Oriana could pretend, in the sixteen or so hours in her apartment, with Dakshini by her side, hair mussed and breathing so gently, strong arms rendered soft by sleep, a face unplagued by whatever thoughts that spiral in her head, that this could work. A relationship could work. It is so easy right now to unlock the malleability in her heart and let it flood outward—to move a hand to brush the hairs across Dakshini’s face, to lean in and kiss her, to feel the warmth of her skin—but can she do the same when times get hard? Oriana’s been through it before. The demands on the industry they work in can split partnerships apart. That’s the truth. So when Dakshini mutters something in her sleep, shifting underneath the covers, Oriana gives in. She preemptively turns off her six AM alarm and instead lays awake in bed, memorizing the seconds that pass, filing each moment in an accordion of snapshots, impressions, and half-formed ideas-- constructing a memory that one day she will forget.

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Dakshini smiles at her, eyes soft, like it means something. The flicker of light from the passing cars renders her dark eyes like still water-- deep enough to submerge, full and heavy, and Oriana is reminded of winter, a year ago, when six AM marked the time where she should've left and she did not. But it's three AM now, in the advent of summertime, and Oriana can't bring herself to leave once again. Dakshini reaches out to graze her fingers against Oriana's cheek and slowly, surely, Oriana turns her head to kiss the tip of Dakshini's finger. Oriana knows she shouldn't. Circumstances are even worse now, to bring up such old feelings. But what does it mean, that they haven't gone stale with time? With precarity? A vicious hope takes hold of Oriana before she tamps it down again, and when reality comes back to her, Dakshini is gone.