#worst part about newsprint though is that it takes a lot of space and can’t be put in a sketchbook

[spiders-and-swords]

[novelconcepts]

fic: learning a lot (about being alive)

So much of the story is the same. Dani. The kids. The lake. So much of the story is exactly the same--only, this time, there is no gardener working at Bly Manor.

The young woman is tired. Exhausted, if she’s truly honest with herself. She feels as though there must be an endpoint to running, a marker down the road that says a person has gone as far as they are able. Rest now, she imagines that marker saying in a cheerily-bold script. Fall down now. Let go. 

She isn’t there yet, she’s pretty sure. Not quite. She doesn’t know how much a person can be expected to carry, or for how long, but at least...at least she has a little left in the tank, yet. Enough to get her affairs in order, if nothing else. Enough to try a little longer to find solid ground. 

***

It was a matter of escaping home, to start with. A matter of escaping old ghosts and older expectations, and that Dani Clayton found all too quickly how easily ghosts can follow a person across miles and miles of world was...unfortunate. It had been naive, maybe, to think she’d leave Eddie behind with the simple act of crossing an ocean. One of those you never know before you try things.

Try, she did. Succeed, she did not. Not at first.

Still, there were bright spots. Travel hadn’t been a large part of her life back home; Edmund was a homebody, her mother always had opinions to offer when Dani mentioned family trips, and there were the kids at school to consider. Reliability had been her middle name, if not by choice, at least by necessity. She’d been twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven years old, and all she’d seen of the world was small-town Iowa. 

And then, unexpectedly: the thread of courage that had pushed her to break things off with Eddie.

And then, even worse: the screech of tires, the scream tearing from her own throat, the awful gurgling sounds Eddie had made as he lay spread-eagled on the blacktop. 

And then, the worst thing of all: glasses, gleaming bright with no sign of Eddie’s laughing eyes behind them, flashing at her from every mirrored surface in the room.

It had been too much. Too much for anyone to bear, Dani was sure. Who could blame her, for running away? Who could blame her, for needing a little space?

Her mother, for one. Eddie’s mother, for another. Even so, she had gone. Packed three bags, bought a guidebook to Europe, jumped a plane for the first time in her life. Bravest thing she’d ever done--or stupidest--and it had been a week before she’d stopped waking up trembling with adrenaline. 

She had some money--enough to get by on cheap hostels and simple foods--but she’d kept her eyes on the listings in every paper all the same. One in particular seemed to burn a little brighter within the newsprint. A charming manor in the countryside. Two children. Live-in au pair required. 

A good, solid job. Money in her pocket, and a path forward through a world that maybe wouldn’t demand Danielle of her any longer. She’d stretched for it, closed her fist tight around the opportunity. 

Those kids had been wonderful. Strange, at times, but what children freshly mourning their parents aren’t strange? The other adults at Bly Manor, too, had been charming and kind--Owen, with his bad puns and his delicious dishes, and Hannah, who had taken Dani by the arm with motherly affection almost before Dani had even introduced herself. They were good people. For a few weeks, she’d felt more at home than she had ever been with people who had known her since childhood. 

Still, there had been shadows cast over the summer. Miles, aggressive without provocation. Flora, sleepwalking. Owen, unexpectedly losing his mother. Hannah, growing more and more distant. 

And, finally, the night everything comes apart. A lake. A spectral form with a too-solid grip around Dani’s throat. A child, screaming in terror. A phrase, falling from her lips before Dani can even process the words. 

Dani says them like a spell. Dani says like them a promise. Dani says them, and blinks, and Flora is in her arms, squeezing so tight around her bruised neck, she thinks she might pass out. 

She almost tips over in cold, dirty lake water, but someone is splashing toward them. Henry. Henry Wingrave, still dressed for the office, bug-eyed and grasping for his niece with panicky hands. Dani gives her over gladly, feeling as though all the strength has been wrung out of her body. 

None of this makes sense. A summer spent at this house, making a warm little hole in the world for her to crawl into, only to culminate in this? In Owen shouting for Hannah, in Miles shaking all over, in Flora weeping and Henry trying to look as though he isn't about to start doing the same?

She can’t handle it. Suddenly can’t stay here. There’s...something happening beneath her skin, something cold and sharp and terribly foreign, and no one is looking at her. No one is seeing the way her hands convulse as she forces them into fists. 

She hears herself say, “I have to...have to go...” and knows no one is listening. Owen’s gone, sprinting off toward the chapel. Henry and the kids are a mess of hugging, shaking, crying bodies. 

A quick stop in the house, a quick stop upstairs to shuck off sodden sweater and mud-encrusted pants, and then she’s climbing through Henry’s still-open car door. Backing down the endless drive. Leaving the manor and all its eccentric shadows in her wake. 

***

Dani Clayton can’t breathe. Can’t think. Can’t drive, either, not really, but she’s made it this far. A few miles down the road, to a little village where most everyone is likely to already be asleep. 

There’s a pub next door to an inn, and she thinks, Nobody will care if I stay the night. Just one night. 

She has no idea what comes after. Is sort of afraid to think about it much. Tonight hasn’t made a lot of sense--her brain is still buzzing with it’s you, it’s me, it’s us, with Flora’s screams and her own gargling panic as an impossible hand tightened around her throat--and maybe that’s fine, for now. Maybe one night of not making sense is an acceptable loss. She’ll just walk into this little pub in this little village that doesn’t know her name, and maybe she’ll feel better after a drink. Or two. 

Or seven.

She’s not much for hard liquor, and her tolerance ought to be negligible, but there’s just something about this night that has unbound her. Alcohol is doing very little to take the edge off this gut-wrenching feeling that she isn’t...right. Isn’t quite who she was two hours ago. Isn’t...alone.

No, she thinks with firm certainty, no, that’s the crazy talking. The crazy I thought I fixed after Owen’s mother’s funeral, but maybe not, maybe it’s still...

She tips back her glass, polishing off a scotch she’d never have thought to order yesterday. Her face contorts; it hurts to swallow, even without the burn. She should probably give up, probably head next door and book a room to sleep this off.

“All right there?”

Her eyes snap to the owner of the voice, which is both thickly accented and alluringly curious. A woman--small, brown hair mussed, eyes watching Dani like she sort of expects Dani to start trouble right here in the smallest pub in England--is leaning against a neighboring table. Dani lets her empty glass drop with a thud against oak scored with initials and curse words. 

“Fine,” she answers shortly. The woman’s brows raise. 

“Only,” she says in a voice much more level than Dani’s own, “you don’t look fine. Look a bit like you’ve had the worst night of your life, in fact.”

Why should she care? Dani wonders. She licks her lips. “That,” she says, “would be an understatement.”

She’s too aware that she doesn’t belong in a place like this--smoke hazing the air, men laughing too loudly near the bar--and that a woman like the one watching her through guarded eyes does. Too aware that her pastel sweater and scrunchie probably label her as an outlier even faster than her American accent.

This woman, on the other hand, has the look of someone who spends most nights in pubs like this one. Her face is pretty--very pretty, Dani realizes with the belated interest of one just opening her eyes--but there’s something of a shield around her smile. Her clothes are clean, but not particularly fashion-forward: a pair of jeans, a ratty t-shirt, thin suspenders. She doesn’t look like anyone who has ever wasted a breath on Dani Clayton. 

But she’s raising her glass in a small salute. Dani raises her empty one right back, glancing at it with mild distaste. 

“Another?” the woman asks, still in that attention-grabbing, almost familiar tone. Dani starts to shake her head--she doesn’t accept drinks from strangers, as a rule, particularly strange women who look at her in ways that make her stomach clench--and changes her mind at the last second. Another. Sure. What harm could it possibly do?

***

Jamie’s back strikes the wall of the women’s bathroom with such force, she almost bites her own lip. Might have done, in fact, if not for the other woman’s lips in the way. 

She didn’t get a name, and figures that’s probably for the best. Bad enough she’s going down this road at all on a first glance--Bly isn’t big, and word travels impossibly fast. Jamie’s spent years keeping her head down, avoiding just these such entanglements. 

But the woman has incredible eyes--one bright blue, one a shocking brown--and accepted a free drink with the air of one who desperately needs a good time under her belt. When Jamie slid seamlessly from her own table to the stranger’s, the woman only smiled. When Jamie let her hand rest lightly on the pocked wood, fingertips grazing the woman’s wrist, she’d taken her lower lip between even teeth in a manner Jamie will probably think about for the rest of her life. 

Bathroom, then. Locked door. Bad choice, but one Jamie’s comfortable enough with so long as this woman is kissing her. 

She’s a damn fine kisser, and seems to have no qualms about showing Jamie as much. Her hands are fleeting, desperate, grabbing anywhere she can reach--Jamie’s collar is the current target, gripped so tight, it’s a wonder the thin material doesn’t tear--and she’s kissing Jamie like this is the most natural thing in the world. Like Jamie’s hand sifting through her ponytail, grabbing hold and tugging to urge her closer, is more welcome than that drink had been. Like Jamie, lips parting to accept a seeking tongue, is more welcome than--

Just a girl, Jamie reminds herself. Just a girl without a name, even. American. Probably won’t see her again, so might as well just enjoy what I get now. 

And what she’s getting is good, certainly. The woman has pressed a thigh between her legs, is riding against her with a panting ferocity that makes Jamie woozy. Her mouth slides from the woman’s kiss, searching for more skin to taste, her nose bumping against gold hoop earring as she licks a spot just below the woman’s jaw. A soft groan is her reward, and she grins against the woman’s skin, grazing with gentle teeth as she dips lower--

“Jesus,” she breathes, leaning back. Her fingers brush the woman’s neck below the collar of her sweater. “Hey, are you--”

“Fine,” the woman says, dragging Jamie’s bottom lip between her teeth and biting down hard enough for Jamie to hiss. 

“These,” she says, pulling slickly away again, “look like bruises--”

The woman is staring at her with a hard expression she can’t quite deconstruct. There’s something feverish about the way she looks at Jamie, something hunted and more than a little disconcerting. 

“I’m fine,” she says again, stiffly. “Do you want...?”

She almost sounds nervous, and Jamie realizes the opportunity for a pleasant evening is rapidly diminishing. Push now, push too hard, and this woman is going to turn on her heel and march out of this bathroom. Maybe out of Bly altogether. 

“If you do,” she answers, like this is nothing more than two bodies searching for something to hang on to. She leans back in, half-expecting the woman to shrink away, the moment already in its grave. Instead, she finds herself making an incredibly undignified noise as the woman slides her tongue into her mouth and a hand up the front of her shirt in the same motion. 

It feels both teenage and foolish, arching into a strange woman’s hand in a pub bathroom. Fascinatingly unwise, letting this woman scramble excited fingers against the seam of her jeans. Truly, just idiotic, sinking to her knees and pulling the woman’s trousers down just enough to seek out hot, wet skin with her tongue. 

Any other place, any other time, any other woman, and Jamie would know better. 

It’s just once, she reminds herself, groaning as the woman bucks into her mouth, slick and desperate, her hands tangled hard enough in Jamie’s hair to hurt. One stupid night with one stupidly attractive American. Life’s short. It’ll never come up again. 

***

Dani is pretty sure her head was removed last night and screwed back on the wrong way. 

She wakes in a heap in an unfamiliar bed, still in last night’s clothes. Her hair is a bedraggled mess around her face, her brain slamming itself repeatedly against her skull like a tiny, terribly angry man trapped in a very small room. Her mouth feels like she forgot to close it all night, her lips feel swollen, and her calves feel...weirdly sore. Like she’d spent the night clenching every muscle in her legs. Like she...

Oh, she thinks, quite unable to convince herself to open her eyes. Right. Like she’d spent the evening with a strange woman in a pub bathroom. A strange woman who had...with her mouth...and a wellspring of eager talent...

“Shit,” Dani says in a very small voice. 

If she doesn’t open her eyes, she thinks, there can be no proving she made choices last night the old Dani Clayton would never make. No proving how many scotches she’d downed. Certainly no proof of the woman whose thrusting tongue had caused Dani to...

She cracks one eye open, relieved when she finds herself in an empty and incredibly boring room that can only belong to some kind of motel. The inn, she realizes, sitting up with a wince. She’d made it to the inn, with its twin bed and its single lamp and its sad little flower print on the far wall.

By the looks of things, she made it to the inn alone. 

That makes it better and worse at the same time, somehow.

She’s far too tired and far too hungover--far too something else, too, something that has not at all diminished with the rising of the sun, and she will not look at it, will not think about it, will not--to care how she looks. Staggering downstairs, hair scraped back from her forehead, clothes rumpled, she gives the innkeeper her best approximation of a smile.

“Excuse me, do you serve--”

“Breakfast next door,” the man says dully, jabbing a pen toward the exit. Dani’s mouth twitches, an old anger pressing itself against her ribs. If there's one thing she can’t tolerate on a hangover and an empty stomach, it’s a man speaking to her like she’s not even there.

Forget it, she thinks with some effort. One perk, she supposes, of having dragged herself in at who-the-hell-knew what hour last night is the lack of packing up to do this morning. No bags. No sign she was ever even up there. She’ll just go next door, get a cup of coffee and maybe a little toast, and...

Ah. I stole Henry’s car last night. She heaves a sigh. 

“No breakfast after all?” the man adds as she stands in the doorway, peering out in search of wherever she parked a much-too-expensive vehicle without Henry’s consent. She considers flipping him the bird. Decides no version of Dani Clayton is quite that crass. 

Even one who spent last night riding some strange woman’s--

“No,” she says primly. “No, I should be getting back.”

***

Henry, to her extreme relief, has not even noticed her absence. Things have been a bit hectic, she gathers. The children are all right--as all right as they can be, anyway; they’re still in bed when she sneaks into the house--but they’re the only ones. Henry, seated at the kitchen table with a mug of cold tea between his palms, looks bruised around the eyes. 

“Long night,” he says, though Dani hasn’t asked. “Are you...?”

“Fine,” she says, as bright and cheerful as she can muster with her skull throbbing. “Where’s Hannah?”

Henry looks at her like she’s just buried a kitchen knife between his ribs. Her mouth goes dry. 

Hannah was not, as it turns out, in the chapel last night. Hannah was not anywhere at all. Not the part of her that counts.

“I can’t explain it,” Henry says in a low, urgently exhausted voice. “If I hadn’t...if it had been any other way, I’d have said I hallucinated the whole thing.”

It’s impossible, and yet, Dani can’t discount the story. Something about this house and its grounds, its atmosphere (its lake, she thinks and pinches a torn bit of cuticle to distract from the word), has her believing in things she’d have said were children’s fairytales a year ago. Ghosts aren’t real; anyone with any amount of sanity knows it. And yet...

You. Me. Us. She shudders. 

They’d gone out to the old well first thing, Henry tells her. He and Owen, walking in silence, both knowing what they’d find and knowing just as well that it was an unacceptable discovery. 

“I offered to go along,” he says hollowly. “When the authorities arrived. He wouldn’t hear it. Must have been an accident, they said, a terrible fall...”

How, Dani wonders, does a woman like Hannah Grose fall into a well?

As if that’s really the question. As if the true question isn't how does a woman like Hannah Gross fall into a well, and just continue about her life for the next few weeks without pause?

Ghosts aren’t real. Can’t be, in a sane reality. And yet, the coroners told Henry there were signs of decomposition going back many days. Hannah, who had been talking and laughing at this table just yesterday night, had been down there alone for so long. 

Can’t stay, Dani thinks with sudden venom. Can’t stay here anymore. Isn’t home anymore. 

It’s the same thought she had in that little blue house across the pond, staring at things that had been Edmund’s--had been, for better or worse, theirs--and understanding some changes are permanent. Some places, once haunted by certain kinds of grief, cannot remain your own. 

As if reading her mind, Henry pushes back from the table. “I’d like very much to thank you for your services this summer, Miss Clayton. I truly don’t know what the children--what any of us--would have done without you.”

She tries to smile. The bones of her face ache. Everything about her is a single rabid pulse of pain, except maybe the smallest corner of her mind, the smallest corner of memory where she is back in a dirty pub bathroom, watching a woman sink to her knees, feeling her eyes roll back as that woman touches--

“It was my pleasure,” she says, and isn’t lying, exactly. She’d do it again, she thinks. All of it. The job. The little family she found so unexpectedly. Rescuing Flora from something she can’t, even now, process. She’d do it all again if asked, and do it exactly the same. 

It hurts no less, for that. 

***

“You’re sure?” Henry asks yet again. He’s out of the car, holding her bags out, his face that of a worried father. Dani thinks he’ll make a good one to those kids, in his own way. “You could stay a little longer. I’d never ask you to--”

“I know,” she reassures him, slinging the backpack over her shoulder. “But honestly, it’s better this way. The kids don’t need me hanging around, and I...”

Can feel her, she doesn’t say. Can feel her moving around, way down where I can’t even catch a glimpse of how or why. If I stay there, if I let it, that house will call to her like a magnet again. Like gravity.

“It’s time for a new adventure,” she says instead, smiling. He believes this smile, she knows. Anyone would. She’s gotten so good at faking it. 

He hugs her once, quickly. It is appropriately awkward, and she even laughs a little. Flora, hanging out of the backseat window almost far enough to fall, looks miserable. 

“You’re really leaving?”

“I am.” Bent at the waist, Dani looks the girl in the eye. Flora’s face is uncharacteristically solemn. “But I promise I’ll write. Call, too, if your uncle gives me the number.”

“Where are you going?” Flora presses. Behind her, Miles lays a clumsy hand of reproach on her shoulder. Dani favors him with a small, comprehending smile. Miles has gone through things none of them can fathom, things he may never be able to talk about. She aches for the too-adult cast about his eyes. 

“I don’t exactly know yet,” Dani tells them both. “Like I said, it’s an adventure. Might end up anywhere.”

“But happy,” Flora says uncertainly. “Right?”

“I’m sure,” Dani says, dropping a final kiss to the top of her head, “it will be perfectly splendid.”

She keeps the smile on her face as Henry ushers Flora back through the window and into her seatbelt, as they pull away from the curb and down the curve of Bly’s main intersection. When they turn the corner, disappearing from view, she lets the expression drop with a sigh. 

A week. A week since the lake, since finding Hannah’s body, since the impossible set up shop in her head. A week of Henry learning to parent in a slapdash rush, of Owen’s face more serious than she’d ever seen it, of yet another funeral. Hannah’s had been a quiet affair, properly spiritual as she’d have liked, and Dani had spent the entire thing trying not to think about the last funeral she’d attended. 

And now, a week later, she’s here. Standing in front of Bly’s one and only little pub once more. It’s barely afternoon; she figures this is as good a place as any to sit for a few hours with a beer and her thoughts, until she figures out what comes next. 

Nothing comes next, she finds herself thinking. You’re carrying a time bomb. You can’t understand it, can’t get rid of it, and there’s no one left to hold your hand as you wait for it to go off. 

Defeatist thinking. Stupid, hopeless, miserable thinking. She’s tired, but she isn’t out of the game just yet. 

Make a plan, she tells herself, slipping through the pub’s front entrance and taking a seat at the bar. Get a drink, make a plan. There’s always a next step. 

Except, this time, she doesn’t know if she believes it. Not really. Not knowing things she isn’t comfortable knowing. Ghosts exist, and ghosts can hurt--not just your grasp on the world, not just your sanity, but you. They can throttle. They can manipulate. They can steal the life out from under you, if only you invite them in.

Not that she can say any of this aloud, not ever, not to anyone. 

Get a drink. Make a plan. Something that doesn’t involve Mom, or Iowa, or Danielle. 

She drops the backpack between her knees, slides the other bags under her seat where she can keep an eye on them. She’s sure she looks exhausted in a hooded sweatshirt, a denim jacket, the skin around her eyes nearly purple with sleepless nights. Pub at noon on a Thursday--maybe no one will notice. 

Not that there’s anyone she’s trying to impress.

“Just a beer,” she says when a shape appears in her periphery. “Please.”

“Sandwich as well?”

Her head comes up so fast, something in her neck cramps. The bartender, back to her, is filling a tall glass. Cloth over one shoulder. Brown hair a messy tangle of curls. 

“It’s--it’s you.”

The woman meets her gaze with a smirk Dani is simply not equipped at noon on a Thursday to cope with. 

“Last I checked,” she says calmly, setting the full glass in front of Dani and wiping her hands on the cloth. “Ought to be, too, seeing as how this is my pub.”

***

Oh, this is rich. This is rich, and this is wonderful, and this is fucking bad.

Jamie, who has been watching this woman loiter outside the pub for the better part of ten minutes, has had exactly this long to come to terms with her own misfortune. Ten minutes, to recognize the world is a shallow, cruel prankster. Ten minutes, to recognize this does nothing at all to stop a woman she’s been dreaming of for a week from walking back through her door. 

I know what you look like when you come, she thinks with a recklessness she truly thought she’s outgrown. And now I'm meant to serve you ale like we’re complete fuckin’ strangers. 

For all her nerves, watching the woman hug an older man, lean into a car to speak to some very small children, Jamie thinks she’s still the better off of their twosome. After all, she gets to decide how she’s going to stand--off the side of the bar, furthest from the door, buying time--and when she’s going to make her entrance. This woman?

Well, judging by her wide Bambi eyes, this woman could have done with a little preparation herself. 

“White or rye?” Jamie asks when the woman continues to gape at her. “Or we can get you a fish and chips plate, if it suits you.”

“I don’t understand,” the woman says. Her hand is clenched around her glass like she’s dimly considering tossing it like a grenade and bolting for the door. Jamie hopes she’ll restrain that impulse. Glass would be a bitch to clear up during the impending lunch rush.

“Well,” Jamie says, leaning her elbows against the bar in a show of carelessness. “When you order the fish and chips, see, they come wrapped in a little newsprint. And the grease makes for--”

“I know,” the woman snaps, “what fish and chips are. I just. I...” She lowers her voice, looking around like anyone’s in the mood to eavesdrop. “Do you...remember me?”

For a split second, Jamie is back in the bathroom, biting at soft thighs, loving the way this woman leaves scratches down the back of her neck. 

“Yes,” she says placidly. “I remember.”

“Okay,” the woman says, leaning towards her so far, she almost topples off her stool. “Okay, listen, I don’t--I mean--I didn’t--”

“Mean to do it,” Jamie suggests wryly. She’s heard this song more times than she can count. “Tripped and fell onto my lips, did you?”

“No,” the woman hisses. “I just--don’t normally do that.”

“Women,” Jamie says. It’s sort of nice, how empty the place is. Gives her plenty of time to sarcastically shift away from caring about how this woman is gazing at her. 

“No--I mean, I haven’t. Before. But I’ve wanted--doesn’t matter.” She’s practically playing jump rope with her own tongue, this poor beautiful woman. Jamie takes pity on her. 

“You mean you don’t normally stride into a small-town pub, put away more booze than the meanest local miner, and drag a stranger back to, ah. Improve your evening?”

“Yes.” The woman slumps against the bar, relief shining like starlight in her mismatched eyes. “Yes, exactly.”

“Was an accident, then,” Jamie says with studied calm. The woman shakes her head. Looks like it hurts, frankly, she’s putting so much behind it. 

“Not an accident. Just. Was a really strange night.”

And this, Jamie thinks, is a very strange conversation. The most she’s ever talked to a woman after sex, in fact. Stranger still, she feels like it was always going to happen, eventually. Like this woman was always bound to stroll back through her door. 

“Well,” she says, giving the bar a decisive rap with her knuckles. “I can be an adult about this, if you can. Agree to behave as though I haven’t, ah--”

The woman raises a single finger in warning, her face flushed. “Don’t.”

Jamie laughs. “Right. Anyway.” She extends a hand, takes the one the woman is jabbing in her direction. “Jamie. Bartender, terminally afflicted by the poor decision to settle in Bly.”

“Dani,” the woman says, squeezing her hand with surprising strength. “Teacher. Au pair. Unemployed.”

“All of the above, or one at a time?” Jamie grins. Dani releases her hand, touches her forehead lightly as if warding off a headache. 

“Honestly, I’m not even sure it matters.”

Strange woman, Jamie thinks. “You’re heading out of town, then? Only, I saw your taxi service come and go...”

If she says yes, that’s all this business taken care of before Jamie can bring herself to think on it too hard. It’d be best, she thinks. Best to let this too-beautiful woman swan right back out of her life, let her become little more than a jarringly-electric memory sneaking up on Jamie at odd moments. Jamie’s got a nice little life here in Bly--boring, but simple. She really doesn’t need anything upending that for her. 

“I don’t know,” Dani sighs. “I don’t exactly have a job anymore. Or a place to stay.”

“But?” Jamie turns her attention toward cleaning glasses, if only to keep from staring at this woman. She looks like it’s been days since last she slept, but there’s something about her eyes Jamie can’t seem to stop glancing at. 

“You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t,” Jamie says. Dani’s mouth twists, a crooked little grin that doesn’t sit quite right on her face. 

“Won’t believe me, then.”

Jamie says nothing. Some people don’t take kindly to being told to trust. Some people need more to put their faith behind. She can’t begrudge it of this woman, or anyone. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Dani says, pausing to take a hearty sip from her glass. Her neck looks better, Jamie notes--the finger-shaped bruises have faded to near invisibility. Not that she’s thinking about Dani’s neck. Not that she’s remembering the way Dani sighed and clutched at her back as she kissed--

“I just don’t want to go back,” Dani says, oblivious. Jamie nearly fumbles the glass in her hand, sets it carefully down on the rack. 

“To your old job?”

“Home.” A surprising amount of venom fits into that single syllable, rolling off of Dani’s tongue. Jamie can certainly understand that. 

“So, don’t.” She turns her back, barely able to believe what’s about to come out of her own mouth. It’s foolish. It’s foolish and dumb and silly, and still: “Stay here.”

Dani’s mouth makes a rather funny sound, falling open. Jamie keeps her eyes on the bar mirror, watching surreptitiously for signs of revulsion in the other woman’s face. 

“Could use a waitress,” she goes on, as if this is the most normal conversation in the world. “Just for a few weeks, mind. Through the fall, maybe. Boss man’ll be back by then.”

“Boss?” Dani repeats. Jamie flashes her a quick grin over her shoulder. 

“I don’t actually own the place. What on earth would I do, ownin’ a goddamned pub in Bly?”

***

She doesn’t mean to say yes. It’s complicated, saying yes to Jamie. Knowing what happened between them, and knowing it happened on a night she can’t explain, is bad enough. Knowing all of that and taking a job working alongside the woman every evening?

It’s a bad idea, and, somehow, that’s the only reason she does it.

She can’t explain it, the recklessness living inside her chest. Doesn’t like the feel of it, curled up against her good sense as though it will, at any moment, open its jaws and consume her best judgement. All she knows is there is something waiting for her to trip up. Something waiting for her to give up. Something that may take her at any time, no matter how she feels about it. 

Without something to hang on to--without something to close her fists around, something to focus all of her attention on--she’s going to give in to it. Sooner than she’d like. 

She doesn’t want to go. 

So, she stays in Bly, of all the places to start an adventure. Small, quiet, boring Bly. With...Jamie.

Not with Jamie, she thinks briskly. Not with Jamie-with Jamie. Just. Alongside Jamie. As a co-worker. A normal, casual, my-tongue-has-not-been-in-her-mouth relationship.

She’s been telling herself this for three days. Three days spent learning the ins and outs of the pub, learning how to navigate the unfriendly, untrusting stares of Bly locals as Jamie hovers just off her periphery. It has been...an experience, to say the least. 

“You’re doing great,” Jamie says at the end of the third night. They’ve just ushered the last of the patrons out into the brisk moonlight, and Jamie is in the process of moving chairs on top of each table Dani wipes down. They’re a good team, Dani thinks, a better team than a week of knowing one another has any right to produce. 

“I spilled a drink in a man’s lap,” she says, to distract from this not-entirely-unwelcome thought. Jamie leans conspiratorially close, shoulder brushing Dani’s as she drops her voice to a whisper.

“You only spilled it ‘cuz he bumped you trying to get a look at your ass. Served him right, I’d say.”

Heat climbs her neck, taking root in her cheeks. She hadn’t noticed. “Really?”

Jamie shrugs. “Does that to every girl who walks through that door. Not our most pleasant customer, to be sure, but he orders enough to keep our doors open, so...”

She makes conversation so easily, Jamie. Like Dani’s been here for years, bustling awkwardly between close-set tables, making small talk around drink orders. She makes conversation so easily, and Dani finds herself responding in kind. Nights here, at the pub, wearing a black apron and a smile that gets a little less plastic every time Jamie leans close and whispers a barb about some customer or another, leave her feeling the most stable she’s been in days.

“How’re they treating you next door?” Jamie asks, sliding her half of the tips across the bar. Dani pockets the money without really thinking about it. 

“Good. It’s quiet. I’m...not used to it, yet.”

She doesn’t say the rest--that she misses those kids, misses the way Owen and Hannah would peck at one another like no one could tell how deep their love ran. That she misses small feet tearing up and down a huge staircase. That she misses having someone who needs her waiting just around the corner. 

Can’t say the other part, either. The part where the room is quiet, and the walls seem not to exhale like they did at the manor, and everything is perfectly still...except for the little spot at the back of her head. That spot where she senses something waiting. Something she doesn’t understand, something that is so unbearably silent...and so incredibly furious. 

“Hey--Poppins. Still with me?” Jamie’s hand touches hers lightly, a bare flourish of fingertips across her knuckles. Dani jumps. 

“Poppins?” she repeats, smiling despite herself. Jamie shrugs.

“Said you were a nanny, didn’t you? For those, ah, rich beasties up the way.”

She had said as much, yes--last night, when Jamie asked what brought her out to England in the first place. “You’re as American as they fucking come,” Jamie had said with a grin that made Dani’s stomach feel like it was falling. “What on earth could have led you to Bly?”

Don’t, a tiny part of her had warned. Don’t tell her. There’s so much story, and so much of it is truly crazy. But Jamie had been leaning her hip against the bar, watching her with gentle interest, and Dani hadn’t been able to resist giving some of that story anyway. The simplest version: had to get away from home, wanted to do good in the world, best skills are with kids. Took the job because it was everything she’d thought she’d needed.

“And?” Jamie pressed gently, when Dani had faltered there. “Was it? Everything you needed?”

You. Me. Us. She’d closed her eyes, felt the world swim around her for one excruciating second. When she’d opened them again, Jamie’s hand was on her elbow, steadying.

“I don’t know,” she says now, as she did then. Jamie’s mouth quirks a little to the side, like she wants to smile solely as a reassurance. 

“Long night.”

It was--every night since the lake has been longer than Dani knows what to do with--and she’s not sure she can stand the idea of spending it alone in her room. The inn is warm, well-lit, and makes her feel like a tinderbox seconds from going up. Restless energy, is all--she’d felt it at the manor, too, that pent-up need to leap from her bed and roam the halls each night--but for some reason, it scares her.

Jamie is watching her still, and Dani is struck with the wild notion that she could ask for Jamie’s company. Could ask not to be left alone tonight. Jamie would probably say yes to anything she asks for, and they’d have a good time together. It would be a campfire in the woods, maybe, just a little light to break up the shadows, but it would be better than nothing.

Not fair, she tells herself. Not fair to her. Not with whatever it is I’m carrying now. 

“Thank you,” she says aloud, touching Jamie’s hand quickly, her thumb swiping across Jamie’s skin in a manner so brisk, it might as well not have happened at all. “You probably want to get to bed.”

Something she can’t--won’t--look at too closely in Jamie’s eyes. Something that makes her whole body clench with a need she isn’t capable of dealing with just now.

“Yeah,” Jamie says softly. “G’night, Poppins.”

***

Dani is better at this than she thinks, Jamie sees right away. Not just the serving gig, either; doesn’t take a mastermind, to take drink orders and drop off plates of bad chips to drunk townies. She’s good at the real heart of the job, the reason people like the citizens of Bly flock to the village’s one and only pub. 

She catches sight of her doing this very thing, probably without even realizing, on a Friday night. The room is packed with bodies, sweaty and laughing and half-gone on half-priced ale, and Jamie’s been looking for her for ten minutes. When she locates her at last, Dani is standing in the very back of the pub, hands on her hips, smiling at the oldest woman in the world. 

Jamie moves just near enough to pick up the gist. The woman, a fixture of Bly in her late eighties, still making her weekly venture to the pub, is regaling Dani with what very well might be her life story. And Dani, rather than looking impatient, rather than letting her eyes slide away in search of something else to do, has her head tipped to the side. Her posture is easy, the first time Jamie’s seen it as such, her focus absolute. 

Just listening. Just listening to this ancient woman like there’s nothing going on around her. 

“That was something,” Jamie says in her ear when Dani finally extricates herself from the one-sided conversation and makes her way back. 

“What was?”

Jamie inclines her head toward the old woman. Dani looks embarrassed. 

“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to ignore the other tables, I--”

“Easy,” Jamie says, neatly stepping in the way of Dani’s breakneck sprint toward a panic attack. “You aren't in any trouble, I just can’t recall the last time I saw someone chat her up.”

She watches Dani relax, charmed by the way Dani smiles almost sheepishly.

“She said she’s been here her whole life. Can you imagine that? Staying in one place for almost ninety years?”

“Can’t imagine being anywhere for ninety years,” Jamie says without thinking. Dani’s brows go up, a comedic little arch that pulls at her heart. She hastens to add, “Only mean it’s been...a life. Not always lived with the best of intentions.”

Dani looks interested, and for a terrifying moment, Jamie thinks not only is she going to push, but that Jamie is actually going to tell her. Everything. Home life, foster care, prison term. Everything that stacks up behind her walls to remind her of why she built them in the first place. 

But Dani, thank fuck, only says, “We all have our baggage, right?” There’s something sad about the way she says it, the way she smiles with what Jamie is coming to think of as a half-light. There’s something going on behind a smile like that, and Jamie knows it isn’t safe to even wonder. Isn’t simple, to even consider caring. 

But you do, something whispers. Don’t you? Even knowing she’ll be gone in a couple of weeks, you do. 

“It’s funny,” Jamie says, a quick-change that doesn’t quite cover the heat she feels has cropped up between them. “That she’d come talk your ear off. She’s not much for words most nights. Thought she’d have gotten her fill at old Mrs. Sharma’s funeral last month.”

There goes Dani’s face again, forming that expression of pure surprise. “Wait. She knew Owen’s mother?”

“Who didn’t?” Owen Sharma, Bly’s kindest, least eligible bachelor. If Jamie had a dollar for every beautiful woman who made moon eyes over the man, she’d be up at least the price of a nice meal. 

Shame about his mother, really. Margaret had been at least as kind as her son, prone to slipping Jamie a wink and a chuckle while Owen blatantly missed all flirtation sent his way. It had hurt, seeing her grip on her own mind slip away. Had hurt worse, knowing Owen was up at that big old house only because it was the nearest he could get to Margaret’s deterioration. 

“Good woman,” Jamie says gruffly. “Kind woman. Hated seeing her go, but if I’m honest, maybe it’s easier on Owen this way.”

“He didn’t seem to think it was easier,” Dani says, but there’s a bit of hesitation in her voice. Like she knows what Jamie was trying to say, and maybe she doesn’t like it, but can’t entirely discount the idea, either. 

“Hang on,” Jamie says, jumping back a few steps. “If you know Owen--”

“Worked with him,” Dani agrees. “At the house. He was our cook.”

Of fucking course. How could I have missed this. “If you know Owen,” Jamie repeats, feeling very certain and very warm all of a sudden, “then you were at the funeral, too.”

The funeral. A surprisingly sunny affair, where the weather was concerned, and utterly miserable in every other way. Jamie, in honor of a woman who once made her feel more welcome in this tiny village than just about everyone her own age, had dressed carefully. Her only black dress. A fine jacket. Neat silver earrings. No one to impress but ghosts.

And she’d felt...incomplete, somehow, standing over the grave. Incomplete and terribly small, as Owen tried to make sense of his mother’s death under the cold stares of fifty strangers. This, they seemed to say with their eyes alone, this is the boy who thought he could get out. Thought he could escape. But Bly calls everyone home, in the end, doesn’t it, Owen?

She’d hated seeing him up there, tears leaking down an uncharacteristically solemn face. Hated the way their eyes followed him as he bowed his head over Margaret’s grave. Owen’s a bit of a prat, a little disconnected, totally unaware of the grip he has on the women of Bly, but he deserved so much better than this. So much better than judging eyes and whispers. 

But, then, who was Jamie to fight his battles for him? This man who might have been a friend, in another life, who is really little more than an occasional customer. She’d shaken her head, tapping a cigarette out of a crumpled pack, and set off a ways for a break from it all. 

And there, behind a tree, had been a woman. 

Jamie hadn’t seen her face. Had, in fact, stood intentionally back a few steps to give the woman a spot of privacy, because the sounds she was making did not invite onlookers. She seemed to have her hands over her mouth, dragging in great hitching sobs that made it sound as though all the air had gone out of the world. 

“All right?” Jamie had asked. Such a stupid, silly thing to say. But the woman had frozen. 

“Yeah.” Voice choked with obvious tears she was just as obviously trying to hide. Jamie had settled the cigarette between her teeth, flicked a lighter, cupped her hands around the infant ember. 

“Funerals,” she’d said, a bit stupidly. No idea why, even. No one in Bly needs her to play nice with their panic attacks. “Truly the worst.”

“Yeah,” the woman agreed, breathless. Jamie could just make out a layer of black dress, cut higher and less conservatively than the village prefers for its more somber events. A bit of black dress, a swatch of blonde hair. Not much else. 

Not my business to look, she’d thought, taking a long drag. Shifted her weight from one boot to the other. Hesitated. 

“S’all right,” she’d said at last. Voice smoke-roughened and more than a little embarrassed by her own forwardness. “I cry three, four times a day, even when there’s no fresh body in the ground.”

“Mmhmm,” the woman replied in a tight voice. Jamie sighed. 

“Only, no one would judge. Or,” she added, thinking of those pinched faces following Owen’s every broken step, “no one who hasn’t earned a punch on the nose for the trouble.”

To her surprise, the woman laughed. Not a big laugh. Just a snort, really, swallowed again just as quickly. Jamie, raising the cigarette back to her lips, fought down a grin. 

“You owe ‘em nothing,” she’d said, with a finality she didn't quite understand. Then, when the woman didn’t answer, a second time: “You owe ‘em nothing.”

Now, with the world of patron and alcohol abuzz around her, she peers into Dani’s face. “You,” she says quietly. “It was you.”

***

What are the odds? That the woman who had talked her down from a small mental breakdown at the funeral had been Jamie. That the woman who had, in fact, sparked something Dani couldn’t explain even to herself had been Jamie. That the woman who, in saying those four tiny words--you owe ‘em nothing--had lit the match she’d used to burn Eddie’s ghost out of her had been Jamie.

“Look a little pale,” Jamie observes. Her hand is loose around Dani’s upper arm, and Dani realizes she is swaying in place. Her heart is a jackrabbit, her head spinning. 

How? How could I not have noticed?

She’d thought Jamie had sounded familiar, hadn’t she? Right at the start, with Jamie raising her glass in a flirtatious little salute. She’d thought that voice rang a bell, and chalked it up to alcohol, to the pounding in her head, to the adrenaline high. 

“Have you ever,” she hears herself say dizzily, “met someone and felt right away you should have known them all along?”

It is an insane thing to say. Jamie ought to bolt for the door, words like that. Instead, brow creased with concern, she leads Dani behind the bar and sets her down on a stool. 

“Stay here a minute,” she commands. Dani drops her head into her hands. 

That night, after the funeral. Hadn’t she been thinking of this woman’s words when she’d taken a bottle of wine and Eddie’s glasses out to the fire? Hadn’t those words been vibrating between her teeth as she’d stared him down, this shadow of the man she’d once loved in all the wrong ways, for the last time?

I owe you nothing anymore, Eddie. I’m sorry. I’m sorry you’re gone, and I’m sorry I was the--I’m sorry you felt you had to run from the truth. But I can’t live like this. Not anymore. 

Drunk words. Sober reality. She’d woken the next morning feeling for the first time in almost a year like each inhalation actually inflated her lungs. 

“Here.” Jamie, reappearing like a magic trick at her side with a glass of ice water and a damp rag. “You’re off the rest of the night, Poppins. Can’t have you fainting on me.”

“Don’t want to go,” Dani begins blearily. Jamie presses the glass into her hands. 

“Not kicking you out,” she promises. “Just. Stay posted up here a while, yeah? I’ll be back.”

It’s an oath she keeps faithfully for the next several hours, performing a perfect balancing act between serving drinks and checking in with Dani. She ought to be embarrassed, Dani thinks, watching Jamie smile and fill glasses and glance back at her every so often to make sure she’s still where Jamie left her. This ought to be mortifying. 

Why isn’t it mortifying?

She watches Jamie, the natural way she glides from joke to joke, order to order, all steady hand and quick smile, and it’s like...like watching a movie you haven’t seen since you were a kid. A movie you used to put on in the background when you were sick, or sad, or lonely. She feels certain that she still knows all the words, the music cues, the parts where she always had to close her eyes against tears she didn’t yet understand. 

In a month of truly strange events, a month littered with ghosts and terrible heavy silences, this is the strangest yet. Looking at Jamie just in time to catch a wink that makes her hands slip against the glass. Looking at Jamie and thinking, I owe her nothing--and that’s the way it ought to be. 

“Feeling better?” Jamie asks when the doors are locked and there is only wood and glass listening in. Dani nods, clutching the now-empty glass and trying to find an expression for her face that will betray none of what she’s been thinking. 

“I’m sorry. It’s been a strange...” She shakes her head. There are words you can only say so many times before they begin to crumble on your tongue. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Seems as though it does,” Jamie says. She hoists herself up onto the bar, legs swinging, looking very young all of a sudden. Dani smiles. 

“It’s a long story.”

“Got time,” Jamie replies, and though it’s two in the morning, and Dani’s body is heavy with exhaustion, she can’t help leaning a bit closer. With Jamie seated this way, she’s a little taller than Dani for the first time, her eyes searching Dani’s face for clues as to...what? How she came to Bly, really? How she came to this pub, really?

How she came to carry whatever it is she can feel watching her every move, matching her step for step, really?

“You’ll think...” She swallows hard. Closes her eyes. Waits for Jamie to say I won’t, or try me anyway, or think what? Jamie doesn’t. Jamie remains quiet, and when she chances another glance, the expression on Jamie’s face almost undoes the small amount of calm she’s been collecting over the last few hours. She’s never seen anyone just...look at her like this. Like they really do have all the time in the world. 

“You’ll think I’m crazy,” she finishes at last, smiling such a hard smile, it feels as though it might snap right off her face. Jamie leans forward, elbows resting on the knees of her overalls. 

“I think you are,” she says, “one of the sanest people ever to walk through this shitty little town.”

And then, without quite knowing why, Dani is talking. About all of it. Dani is spilling things she can’t explain, can’t quantify: about Eddie, about deciding no longer to allow him ownership of her life even in death; about Hannah and the well, the way the woman had been so lovely and so strong and so not there at all, in the end; about the children and their unexpected passengers, about how Rebecca Jessel had tried to the last to rescue Flora from a fate Dani can’t imagine, even now. 

And she tells her about the Lady. 

She tells her about the specter with its hand like a claw, who had picked her up like a squirming sack of flour and dragged her through that house. About how Flora had saved her life in the way only a child can think to try. About how she’d saved Flora in return, even if she can’t explain it. 

Jamie listens. To all of it. Eyes serious, mouth drawn in a gentle frown. She’s nodding, Dani realizes. Nodding, and watching Dani’s eyes the whole time. 

“See?” Dani says at last, and realizes she’s crying. The silent tracks of tears are warm on her cheeks, skidding off her chin and into her lap. She’s crying, and she’s breathing through it, and somewhere deep inside, she thinks she hears the crash of waves. “Crazy. Think I’m crazy. Think I’m going--”

Jamie, so gracefully, she almost doesn’t see the change, pushes off the bar and crouches beside the stool. Her hands find Dani’s, a gentle grip that makes the world stop swaying for a moment. 

“Think you are,” she says in the most determined voice Dani has ever heard, “surprisingly sane. All things considered. And I want you to know, you don’t have to--”

Dani’s got her by the shoulders. Dani’s dragging her upright, surging right off her seat, pressing her back against the bar. Dani, who understands on a level that is conscious and legitimate and wise that this is her co-worker now, and finds she does not particularly care, kisses her with such desperation, she nearly moans into Jamie’s mouth. 

Jamie should push her off. Jamie should be gentle and solid and certain in her dismissal. This is a bad idea. This is a bad--

“I have a flat,” Jamie breathes against her lips. Dani realizes Jamie’s hands are in her hair, Jamie’s mouth is flushed pink, Jamie is looking at her eyes. “I have a flat upstairs.”

***

“I want you to know,” Dani pants against her neck, “I’m not doing this because I’m--”

She hesitates, apparently not quite invested enough in what they’re doing on Jamie’s couch to use the word haunted. Jamie catches one hand, brings it to her lips, kisses each finger slowly. Taking her time, letting her tongue drift from index to middle to ring, watching Dani’s eyelids flicker. 

“Want you to know,” Jamie replies, when she feels certain the welling panic in Dani’s eyes has been effectively banished once more, “you don’t have to explain. And you don’t have to do this, either. If you don’t want to.”

Dani, sitting in her lap, shifting her weight so her torso presses against Jamie’s, gives her a truly hilarious look. “Does this feel like I don’t want to?”

Jamie grins. There’s just something about being in this situation that is funnier than she knows what to do with--Dani, having just told her the kind of life story better suited to a horror film, in her flat, on her couch, kissing her neck. It feels like the wrong genre, somehow. Like the wires of the world have been crossed, and Jamie would give anything to leave them this way. 

Fact is, she hasn’t liked the way anything feels the way she likes this. Hasn’t liked the presence of anyone in her world--her town, her pub, her home--like she likes Dani. 

Known her five minutes, the intelligent, ever-shrinking part of her brain protests, even as she lets Dani coax her head back on the arm of the couch, even as she lets Dani suck gently at the skin just below her ear. 

Kinda knew it after one, she thinks, hands flexing on the back of Dani’s sweater. 

This isn’t like before, she recognizes. Last time, there was a hunger in Dani bordering on feral, like she was running so hard from something Jamie didn’t even know existed that only Jamie’s body had stopped her running right off the edge. Tonight, Dani looks at her and Jamie is confident--confident in a way she’s never been with anyone in her life--Dani is actually seeing her. Actually choosing her. 

“You said,” she hears herself say, even as she’s gripping Dani’s waist. Dani has moved to straddle one thigh now, is rocking slowly back and forth, making soft whimpering noises into every kiss she leaves on Jamie’s skin. “You said there are people you meet...”

Dani groans, and Jamie pulls at her hips faster, harder, liking the way Dani is panting against her shoulder. “You feel you should have known all along,” she finishes, turning her head to kiss Jamie’s lips. “Yeah. Yeah.”

“Me too,” Jamie says, her own body straining to get closer. There are way too many clothes between them, she has decided, but it’s up to Dani to take them further. Up to Dani to decide what she’s okay with. After everything she just told Jamie downstairs, it’s the least Jamie can offer by way of comfort. 

When Dani pushes up enough to take Jamie with her, shoving the straps of her overalls down and dragging her t-shirt over her head, she figures she made the right call. 

“You too,” Dani says, looking at her--at her; Jamie feels quite certain this is what it feels like to jump and find yourself flying--as though she never again wants to look at anything else. Jamie nods, pressing their foreheads together, trying to catch her breath even as Dani is sliding curious hands down her chest. 

“Minute I met you. Minute I saw you. So, who’s crazy now?”

Dani laughs, and it’s the sweetest sound Jamie’s ever heard. This is different, she understands, so different from a quick fuck in a bathroom. This is going somewhere, even if neither of them have a map. 

She brings Dani to bed, wanting on some level deeper than decision to do this properly. It feels right, to guide Dani back onto clean sheets and cheap pillows, to help Dani out of her clothes in small, measured movements. It feels, she thinks with the clearest head in the world, like Dani was always supposed to be here. That no matter how the story unfolds, no matter how many roads it takes to get them here, this is the endpoint. Dani, gazing up at her, hair messy, smile angling against Jamie’s mouth. Dani, arching under her hand, saying her name in a sharp, heady way Jamie suddenly can’t do without. Dani, who says she’s crazy, who doesn’t say she’s haunted, clenching tight around Jamie like she was always supposed to be here. 

“Please,” Dani sighs, “Jamie.” And Jamie thinks, Whatever it is, yes. Whatever you need, yes. 

Five minutes, that nearly-banished whisper repeats. 

Knew after one, she thinks again, curling two fingers and watching Dani spiral. 

***

Jamie sleeps like she’s never been afraid of anything hiding in the dark. Lips parted, arms tossed without care, she sleeps more deeply than Dani would have guessed. Even when Dani rises, carefully removing the hand she had kept tucked around Jamie’s middle all night, Jamie barely stirs. 

I haven’t slept like that in years, Dani thinks with a rush of fondness. C’ept maybe last night. 

She wants to blame it on the sex, on Jamie working her over once, twice, three times before she’d even been able to reciprocate. Wants to say only good sex can knock a person out, banish nightmares that have been so present for so long, they’re really more like old friends. 

Wasn’t that, though, she thinks, pulling Jamie’s discarded t-shirt on and perching on Jamie’s side of the mattress. Was something else. 

There is a catharsis, maybe, in telling your story to someone who is really listening. A release not found anywhere else. She hadn’t meant to tell Jamie everything--had certainly not expected Jamie to, if not understand, accept it without a word of discouragement. If Dani had been listening to that story, with all its hidden bumps and screams, would she have been able to nod and kiss the storyteller without so much as a chuckle?

Maybe it depends on the storyteller. Or maybe it’s just Jamie. Jamie, who has seen her naked in two very different ways, and has yet to flinch from either. Jamie, who even now is sleepily rolling onto her back, groping along the pillow where Dani ought to be. 

“Dani?”

Her heart lurches, squeezes, the sound of her name as the first thing out of Jamie’s mouth bringing tears to her eyes.

“Here,” she croaks, and Jamie--eyes still shut against the burgeoning sunlight through thin curtains--stretches until her fingers find Dani’s wrist. Her face relaxes, her smile soft. 

“Thought I’d scared you off,” she says, a joke that isn’t a joke at all. Dani bends over her, kissing her cheek. She can still taste Jamie, can still feel the way Jamie gripped the sheets in both hands as she let Dani explore uncharted territory for what had felt like hours. 

“Not going anywhere,” she hears herself say, and though the terrible silence in her head seems to tighten, she feels as though it is true, somehow. For how long, she can’t say. But there is a confidence in the sentiment all the same, an assured little edge to it like a promise. 

“Good,” Jamie mumbles, curling toward her until her face presses against Dani’s hip. The kiss she leaves is clumsy, but Dani feels the heat of it go straight to her core all the same. 

How can I know I want that kiss every day for as long as I’m here? How can I possibly know that?

“You’re worrying,” Jamie says, nuzzling against her skin, eyes still shut. Dani smiles, sifts gentle fingers through tousled curls.

“How can you tell?”

“I am,” Jamie says in a voice like one tumbling back into sleep, “a genius.”

“You are,” Dani laughs, “still asleep.”

“Nope.” To prove her point, Jamie cracks open one eye. “See? Perfectly present, Poppins.”

Dani is, for the first time in a long time, perfectly present herself. It scares her a little--not as much as the beast scares her, not as much as the weight of exhaustion fitting itself around her shoulders and pressing down scares her, but all the same. This is fear, of a kind. And excitement, of another. 

And hope, maybe. Just a little scrap of it, lining the bottom. 

“I should go,” she says, and Jamie opens the other eye, groaning. 

“You should stay,” she suggests, sitting up and pressing close to punctuate the idea. As small as she is in sleep, she feels like she could take up the whole room, now. Dani licks her lips. 

“We open--”

“When I unlock that door,” Jamie finishes for her, something sly and delicious about the way she’s looking Dani over. “S’that my shirt?”

Dani shrugs, liking the way Jamie’s eyes make her feel like she needn’t have bothered with covering up at all. Jamie cups her cheek, kisses her with all the slow careful energy of a woman revving up for something glorious that might take all day. 

“You’re not...I mean...you remember what I said last night?” Dani doesn’t really want to be saying it, doesn’t really want to drag focus away from the way her entire body goes shock-bright when Jamie’s tongue slips into her mouth. Even as the words are coming out of her, her hands are sliding up Jamie’s body, familiarizing themselves once more with sleep-warm skin. 

“The part about feeling crazy?” Jamie breaks just enough to speak, still within kissing distance. Dani steels herself. 

“The part where I don’t understand what’s happening to me. But it is happening, Jamie. Whatever it is.”

Jamie, holding the back of her head, peers into her eyes. Dani holds her breath, waiting for the flinch, waiting for Jamie--no longer sex-addled--to find some sign of the beast behind her gaze. 

“I only see you,” Jamie says, as if reading her mind. She smiles, almost self-conscious. “I only see you, and I’d...like to keep seeing you. If you’ll stay.”

She should say no. Should say it’s unprofessional at best, utterly unwise on a deeper level at worst. Should say Jamie’s better off without her, everyone’s better off without her, who knows how much time she even has before the thing she’s carrying like a disease comes to call--Jamie, you can’t take this on. It isn’t fair. 

Don’t think fairness much comes into it, a voice very like Hannah’s echoes. She squeezes her eyes shut. 

“Hey.” Jamie isn’t trying to kiss her now, is holding one hand anchored to her ribs like she believes it’s the only thing keeping Dani from floating away. “Poppins. I’m not asking for your hand in marriage, all right? Just...I like you. Like you quite a lot, as it turns out. I’d like to see where...where this goes.”

She’s waiting, Dani realizes, for Dani to laugh at her. To say absolutely not. To say there is no chance in hell. How many women have said as much to Jamie before? How many women have shot her down for less?

I’d like to find out, she thinks with surprise. I’d like to find out everything about her. 

“I can’t make promises,” she says. “I don’t know how much--”

“But you have now,” Jamie says, somehow managing to interrupt without stealing the words from Dani’s mouth. “Yeah? You have right now. In this bed, with me. Wearing my shirt better than I ever have,” she adds, plucking at the hem until Dani can’t fight a smile. 

“Yeah, but--”

“So,” Jamie says, shifting gently until Dani is laying beside her, hip sinking into the mattress, eyes barely a breath from Jamie’s. “I promise today. Here. In this bed, with you...probably not wearing my shirt much longer, if I’m honest.”

Dani laughs. She’s moving toward Jamie without meaning to, their legs tangling. Jamie kisses her once, very softly.

“And I promise you this afternoon, if the morning goes all right. And this evening, if you aren’t screaming up the road by then. Tomorrow, we re-evaluate the whole thing. Decide how we feel then.”

Dani is nodding. Can’t seem to stop nodding.

“Each day,” Jamie says, punctuating every word with a long kiss Dani has no desire to see end, “on its own merit, Poppins. One at a time. If they stack up, they stack up.”

Dani, unable to resist, pulls her close. One at a time, she thinks. I can do that.

***

The young woman is tired. Exhausted, if she’s truly honest with herself. She feels as though there must be an endpoint to running, a marker down the road that says a person has gone as far as they are able. Rest now, she imagines that marker saying in a cheerily-bold script. Fall down now. Let go.

She isn’t there yet, she’s certain. As certain as she gets these days, anyway.  She doesn’t know how much a person can be expected to carry, or for how long, but at least there is Jamie. Jamie, who grins at her as they bustle around the pub like clockwork, who takes her to the stockroom under guise of replenishing the peanuts and has her muffling sighs against an open kiss, who looks at the calendar at month’s end and says, “Y’know, Poppins, boss man’ll be back next week. Thinking I could use a break from Bly. What d’you say?”

One day at a time, she thinks, but the idea of a road trip with Jamie is too much, too wonderful, to say no. It’s only an idea until it happens, she reminds herself. Only an idea until they’re in the car, Jamie’s hand covering hers, Jamie pressing down the gas pedal like the whole world is theirs to claim. 

She’s tired. Been tired a terribly long time, if she’s honest with herself. And maybe that’s just the way it goes, for anyone, even those too lucky for ghosts. Maybe the trick really is just finding someone to be tired around, someone who is willing to hold your hand, learn your secrets, kiss away your monsters. 

She might not be okay forever. Might not even be okay much longer. But Jamie’s making happy murmurs about Vermont and wanting to start a garden, and there’s a light in her eyes that makes Dani feel more alive than she has in months. 

A little longer, then. If the days stack up, so be it. It’s enough, just to try a little longer to find solid ground.

[demondeanismybaby]

I Just Need a Break Part 8

Pairing: Sam x reader, past Dean x reader

Word count: 2153

Warnings: Angst, a ton of it. TW:PTSD, vague mentions of past abuse but nothing graphic.

Summary: Trying to start a new life with Sam, it is like trying to start a car with no engine. The parts might look ok on the outside but inside everything is just wrong.

A/N: Wow, this is getting so long. Mostly this is set up for what happens in the next chapter. Read past parts here....

Part one Part two Part three Part four Part five Part six Part seven

After hours of driving, in what seemed like a fairly aimless fashion Sam pulled off onto a small gravel road. The car jostled up and down and you held onto the edge of the door. Pulling up you saw a small cabin. It wasn’t any spectacular but it looked quaint surrounded by trees with a little brick chimney peaking up from the sharply angled roof.

Sam turned to face you, “honey were home.”

You couldn’t control the words that sprang out next, “dude are you insane?”

His face faltered slightly, and you felt guilty. Thought the idea that Sam had found a place where the both of you were supposed to live like some nuclear family was worrisome. Sure, it was something out of fairy tale, the hero rescues the princess and they sail away into the sunset but you hadn’t spent most of your life hunting to know that most of the time even those ended badly. Recovering from the shock after your initial reaction you tried to reel it in.

“I’m sorry,” you smiled, “lets go check it out.”

Hopping out of the car, he walked quickly to your side to open it for you. He grabbed your hand and lead you up to the entryway of the place, the paint was flaking off slightly and you could picture when it was first painted being a deep blood red, but now it all looked a muted pastel color.

The door creaked a little as Sam jiggled the knob and used his should to force it open. He scooped you into his arms and you hit his chest lightheartedly, “What are you doing?”

Carrying you bridal style until he stepped over the threshold, he set you back down on your feet, “it’s tradition right?”

Rolling your eyes at him you added, “wrong tradition, you haven’t even proposed yet.” Your stomach dropped hastily, “I mean, not that you would it is just...” you stammered.

He, thankfully, ignored you to grab your hand again. Leading you into the tiny kitchen, then the living room, and finally the bedroom. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it did come with the basics. There was a bed, you didn’t want to imagine who slept in before you would, a couch and a small table. Plus a random assortment of other little things but it all meant you wouldn’t be sleeping on the wood floors.

“I like it.” You hugged yourself against his side, feeling that this might not be the worst situation you could imagine.

“Good,” he leaned his head on top of yours, “I think its going to be great.”

You were glad that Sam had managed to keep a stash of old stolen credit cards as you made your way through a small department store in the town a few miles away. You sat in the car and waited tensely for Sam to pick you out clothes enabling you to at least go out places and not have to wear his stuff, he was also going to grab food and other random necessities for your new place.

You tapped your finger restlessly against the window, looking out onto the empty parking lot. It was the middle of the day on a Thursday so not peak shopping hours, but being out in the open made you feel nervous. You let your mind wander back to all of the texts that you had seen on Sam’s phone from his brother. Assuming that he didn’t have a clue where you both were was not a huge comfort after what had happened.

At the squeal of metal you tensed your body, the sharp string of the door smacking against your funny bone made you yelp.

“What did you do?” It had only been Sam loading things into the car.

“Nothing, just a little jumpy still.”

He tucked your hair behind your ear. You pressed into his palm, feeling the warmth of his touch bringing you back to this crazy circumstance. You were sitting here playing house with the man you loved, you wished you could enjoy it more, making up your mind that you were going to do your best to make this work.

“Hey can I carry something,” you watch as Sam tried to balance all of the bags on his arms.

Using his foot, he kicked the backdoor closed on the car, “Nope, I got it.”

“I’ll go get the door,” you walked ahead of him doing your best to shove it open even though, clearly it liked to stick. Your pushed your weight into it and finally it swung open.

Sam started putting things down in the kitchen and put away all your new housewares. He paused, handing you a bag the plastic was starting to tear out at the bottom it was so full.

“Fashion show?” He glanced at you, his grin was innocent and you shook your head yes.

Wanting to get his attention however you started to tug his oversized shirt past your ears, you could feel static clinging to your hair, you dropped it on the floor. Letting yourself smirk as Sam eyed you with obvious interest, his tongue darted out across his bottom lip. It spurred you on to wiggle his pants off your hips. You had been forgoing wearing anything underneath the clothes so you were totally bare.

Bending, you exaggerated the movement as you got into the bag of clothes and slowly slipped on one of the tank tops he had picked out, it was snug, clinging to your body and revealing your peaked nipples. You picked through a few more items and found some denim shorts, and slipped them on. Doing a quick twirl you paused facing him, “so what do you think?”

He slid a hand along your clavicle, the tips of his fingers danced over your chest, and then he was stepping closer to you. The space between your bodies non existent. Instead of taking you right there like you were expecting he clasped his hands at the small of your back.

“Your not ready,” he leaned his face against yours.

You started to push away from him, angry tears forming, but he held tight. So you went slack against him. You knew he was right, it wasn’t only physical, you wanted to be with Sam to further erase what had been done to you. Waiting would be hard, trying to escape what had happened, but this would possibly secure your future with him.

You squirmed out of his grasp, he was peering at you his hair falling into his face and frowning, you ran your fingers through it to try and show it wasn’t out of anger you pulling away now.

“Your right, I know we should wait,” besides adding a light kiss against him there wasn’t anything to add. You grabbed the clothes that were scattered from you digging threw it and heaped them in your arms as best you could and carried it upstairs. If you felt the weight of Sam’s gaze on your back, you didn’t let it slow you down.

Night fell around the tiny home you were going to share with him, and you laid against the new sheets he had placed on the bed earlier. You copied the little floral design absently, not able to sleep but not awake enough to try setting up anymore of the house.

The bed sank down at Sam’s added weight, even though you mind had been going non-stop since the events earlier, you were calmed by the way he immediately spooned up against you. His intimacy making you feel quieted. You tried to shut down and let your mind go blank but after a few moments you started to squirm, you had a sinking feeling that as soon as you feel asleep the nightmares would start and it made your chest tighten.

Climbing out of bed you walked out of the bedroom and over to where Sam had set up the coffee maker. You pushed buttons and pulled out a filter and did what you needed to get some caffeine. After a while you could hear the steady drip, and you drummed against the counter impatient to get what you needed to stay awake. When you saw there was enough for a cup, you poured it into one of the mugs Sam had picked out, ‘worlds best dad’ it proclaimed, you shook you head.

“Coffee huh? Isn’t it little late,” you looked over the top of your mug to see him wiping a hand over his eyes and mouthing the words between a yawn.

You shook your head, miming a no, “I thought maybe I could start trying to find us a case or something nearby.”

He sat down, kicking up his feet onto the already scuffed table, watching you move around the kitchen and living room. Trying to balance the laptop, a local newspaper, and your coffee, you grimaced as you felt something wet dripping onto your foot and down the legs of your pj pants. Sam hopped up quickly, rushing over to help take your mug and bring it over to the table, then carefully sat back down.

“What?” You asked Sam, after you had seated yourself across from him, shuffling through the newsprint.

He looked at you guiltily, you had seen the strange expression on his face in your peripheral vision, it was the kind of thing that screamed ‘I’m worried’.

“So, maybe stop giving me the puppy dog face,” you were trying to keep a even expression but you knew your tone was giving it away as being more than a joke.

He pushed the laptop closed, the last thing you saw on the screen had been a headline about a man falling off the roof of a ten story building, and then you saw the shaggy hair framing the biggest frown imaginable.

“If I were making any face,” he said as you carefully avoided any eye contact, “then what it would be saying is that this is not like you.”

Debating what you next move should be, you knew you had two options, storm out which was what you wanted but would prove his point, or stay and continue having the worlds most pointless argument. Sam knew what was wrong, but couldn’t find a way to openly discuss it because everything came back to Dean. They were blood, and that was always going to be there, no matter how much he cared about you.

So you just sat, lips pressed together, and waited for him to unload all of his problems with all of yours.

“I know this can’t be easy for you, I saw what he did, ok?”

Picking up the laptop, you threw it on the ground, pieces scattered across the floor some slipping under the fridge and stove. Sam shielded his face from the plastic shards, but it just gave you an opportunity to keep smashing things, next was the little ceramic mug. The remains of your cold coffee spraying out, finally though as you heaved in breaths you felt him grab your arm as it was getting ready to throw your cell phone.

Yanking yourself away from him, you turned to level him with a harsh glare, “you saw what he did? That’s what we’re going to go with Sam?” The words were rushing out of you but even though you were pissed they were said in a whisper, “I go to sleep and I dream of it, I stay awake and it’s all I think about, and then you bring me out here in the middle of nowhere so we don’t ever have to face it.”

He actually recoiled at that, it was as if you had punched him, and in a way you wished you had. You knew you were angry but the truth was trying to pretend like you were here in this house with him because you were both so in love was wearing you down, this was nothing more than a hideout, and it was an insult to how you felt about Sam.

Calming yourself you went and grabbed the broom from the corner, it had come with the place and was so dirty you felt it defeated its purpose, then you started to sweep up piles and toss them into the garbage. Watching as the pieces tumbled in feeling that this was never going to end.

You felt his hand cusp the back of your neck, turning around and letting the broom clatter onto the floor, you wrapped yourself around him in a hug. Noticing that you were shaking slightly but you couldn’t be sure if it was residual anger or just absolute sadness.

“I don’t know how we can keep pretending that this is all happening because we finally found each other,” you pressed against him further.

“We aren’t pretending, things are more complicated, that’s all,” he said..

It was enough to have you knowing with certainty that he was going to play out the charade for a while longer.

Letting you go, he moved to finish cleaning up the mess you had made, and you bent down to help him. After a while the evidence of your outburst was gone and Sam went back into the room to lay down. You weren’t tired but you followed him anyway, and this time when you couldn’t sleep you laid there and listened to his breathing.