Archive of Our Own

If you want to go there, after graduation, to live... I would tag along, if that’s okay. ‘Cause… I don’t want to have any adventures, unless they’re with you.

Jade presses the palm of her hand firmly against her middle like the pressure will ground her, thirty thousand feet in the air. Her stomach is empty and deeply unhappy, spreading the awful feeling up the back of her throat. She’s never been able to eat much on planes, her lesson learned the first time she’d ever flown when she and Kit had gorged themselves on airport candy before getting on the plane - and on free orange juice after - and Jade had thrown up all over Kit so hard she’d cried.

Jade had cried, that is, hot tears squeezed out her eyes by the punishing force of her retching and worse, the shame after. Meanwhile Kit had screamed the way she did when they’d watched Gremlins together the week before, so disgusted it came out as delight because Kit was never happier than when she had a dramatic story she could re-enact later. Two of the flight attendants had given them spare uniforms and, since they’d been unaccompanied minors and the last off the plane, they’d been allowed a look inside the cockpit. Jade, red with the horror of everyone seeing her messy insides, had huddled as far back as she could while Kit (or quite possibly, Kit’s surname) had charmed the pilot into letting her keep his hat.

“Bits of her sick are still in my hair!” Kit had told him, pulling it down over her head, which was swamped by the size of the hat. “This’ll hide it!”

The man in the aisle seat glances at Jade anxiously now, and Jade sets her jaw. You are not going to throw up this time, she schools herself. You didn’t throw up when your harness failed and you were hanging upside down from the giant fucking cypress and you didn’t throw up that night you lost to Boorman at his rigged drinking game and you aren’t going to throw up now.

She wishes Kit was sitting beside her. Countless times over the last twelve months Jade has wished Kit was with her, someone to explore the world with, someone to lean against at the end of a long day, someone to make the place she’d tried to call home this year actually feel like one in her heart.

“Miss?” her seatmate says, already unbuckling his belt so he can move. “If you need the lavatory-”

Jade clenches her hand on the brown paper bag; it’s like he’s inviting her to lose her fight with herself. “I’m fine,” she grits out. She doesn’t see the look on his face, but he decides it's time to take a walk about the cabin.

She’s fine. Just a few more hours and she’ll be on solid ground again, and Elora will be flinging herself through the airport to pull her into a hug. Elora had promised her this when they’d spoken on the phone three days ago, and Jade had clutched the receiver and wanted to ask so much more. How was everybody? Had Airk had his heart broken again? Was Sorsha even coping after being voted out of office? Was Graydon doing alright since his arrest?

And… was Kit going to come to the airport too?

But her time on the call had been running out, and she wasn’t the only person who needed to use the solitary public telephone in town before they all had to pile into the van and head back into the Wildwood.

“I miss you,” she’d said to Elora instead. “Tell everyone I miss them?”

“Everyone knows,” Elora promised her. “Don’t you worry.”

Jade couldn’t help it. “Tell them anyway?”

Tell her.

Jade’s credit had run out then, but she knew Elora would have promised. Would have passed the message on beautifully. Elora always was better at putting feelings into words than Jade ever had been.

Jade’s stomach clenches again, this time with guilt, though it swiftly mixes with the nausea and anxiety and the general grossness from being on a day-long flight, and Jade tips her head back and closes her eyes and tries her very best to wait out the last hours before she’s back on solid ground.

The airport is done up for the season, thousands of twinkling lights hanging from the ceiling and an enormous tree - Tir Asleen has always done enormous trees very, very well - absolutely dripping with decorations. Jade looks close enough to see the city’s emblem stamped onto every bauble and then her attention is grabbed entirely by Elora, hurtling herself across the shiny floor toward Jade, and Kit, trailing behind her.

The sight of them both knocks her speechless and Jade drops her bag so she can catch Elora in both of her arms and cling onto her properly. Her first thought is an exclamation of how ginger Elora’s hair is now, and her second is about Kit. She can’t help but stare over Elora’s shoulder. Since they met, they’ve never been apart for more than a couple of weeks so this year has felt like a lifetime. If the right words for this reunion exist, they’re flung right out of her at the sight of Kit with her arm in a sling. Jade looks at it in horror, she could never handle the idea of Kit getting hurt.

“Kit?!” is the first word out of her mouth. “What did you do?!”

Kit reaches down and picks up Jade’s backpack with her good arm, and she’s grinning but now she has no free arms, and Jade doesn’t know what that means - is it a sign not to hug her? Or is it Kit, loathing the idea she could ever look helpless or broken? Something inside Jade is desperate to wrap her up in her arms somehow, around the bulk of her bag, around the sight of that sling that’s setting off every caretaking instinct in Jade’s heart… but she doesn’t want to hug her if Kit doesn’t want to be hugged.

“I’ll never tell,” Kit says with a smile, and there was a time when they both would have known it was a lie, because Kit could never keep a secret from Jade, not a secret with a story behind it like this, but it’s been so long and Jade isn’t sure of anything any more. Maybe she’s lost the right to know Kit’s stories.

“She broke her fist in battle,” Elora fills in, linking arms with Jade to begin guiding her through the crowds of reuniting families and lovers. “Saving my skin.”

Jade’s eyes dart between them both, trying to see immediately through so much history she hasn’t been a part of. She’s so tired she can’t get a grasp on anything. Battle?!

“Are you both okay?”

“We disappeared into the crowd before they could catch us. No charges laid, baby!” Kit gloats, proud of her slippery, punching self. Jade can’t help but want to be proud of her too, but she also can’t stop looking at the sling as Kit leads the way, walking backward.

“Who did you hit?”

“Maybe we wait till we’re back in the truck before we answer that question,” Elora says. Her voice is mild, but there’s a weight to it that quiets Kit. Things have definitely changed between them since Jade left, they’re acting like a unit. It's not that Jade’s upset about this - she’s kind of hero-worshipped Elora since the day they met, to a younger Kit’s chagrin, and Kit… well, Kit is Jade’s best friend, of course she wants them to be friends as well.

Kit doesn’t stay quiet for more than a moment. “More importantly,” she says, and she’s finally looking at Jade in a way Jade recognises, full of devilish mischief. “Much more importantly, because we have money riding on this - Jade Astrid Claymore, answer us this: did you hurl on the plane?”

“You jerk.” Jade stares back, hoping her expression is as cutting as these monsters deserve. “Jerks plural.”

“I bet in support of your iron stomach,” Elora protests, giving Jade a squeeze. The blend of physical contact and Elora’s support is so potent Jade is rocked by how deeply it hits her. She’s missed it so much, craved it so much.

“I didn’t,” Kit says, all shit-eating grin, and Jade has craved this too; being known so well that the intimate knowledge becomes a tool for remorseless bullying. She can feel herself tearing up.

Fuck - she’s so exhausted she’s getting emotional about bullying. It makes her feel ridiculous, and she’s glad when they step out of the airport and the vicious bite of a winter in the Vale sinks its teeth into her face. The promise of snow in the air does a lot to peel off the clamminess that’s been clinging to her since she lost her battle with herself and threw up in the cramped aeroplane toilet, too. A shower will be better, but a shower is still a long drive off.

Jade feels like she's doing a really good job of being normal till they get back to the truck and Elora leans in, grabs a lunchbox from the front seat, and pushes it into Jade's hands. When Jade cracks open the plastic lid she loses it completely over the smell of the gingerbread cookies.

“Oh Jade,” Elora pulls her into a full body hug while Jade tries to rein in her tears. “You’re alright. It’s been a long day.”

“It’s been a long year,” Jade’s voice cracks, harder than she’d like. She doesn’t want to give them the impression her year has been bad, and sobbing into your friend's handknit cardigan kind of does give that impression, she knows.

But it has been a long year. A hard year. A worthy year, and she doesn’t regret going, doesn't regret working side by side with her sister, doesn’t regret seeing the deep, deep satisfaction of watching a damaged place come back to life and knowing that her skills, her knowledge, her dedication had helped make it happen, but–

That worthiness, that purpose, has never been able to stop the feeling that comes to her at night, lying alone in her bed with her heart beating out the truth that something was missing, missing, missing.

Jade tells herself to stop crying and, because she has spent her whole life bullying things like tears and unruly emotions (and more recently, entire landscapes) into submission, she stops. Pulling away from Elora’s damp shoulder, she sorts out her face with the soft cuff of her sleeve, rolls her eyes at Elora and Kit to let them know she knows her little outburst was over the top.

“But I'm here now,” Jade pushes a smile onto her face, and when that does nothing to combat Elora's sceptical look, she lifts her gaze to the sky instead. It's low and dark and moody behind the glare of the lights in the parking lot. Someone really has gone all out, frostbitten tinsel and plastic holly are twined through the chain link fences, little strands of silver caught on the coil of barbed wire, twisting in the chill wind.

“Are you gonna stand there gawking at the sky or are you gonna get in the truck so we can get moving?” Kit asks, and punches Jade in the shoulder.

It’s the first time they’ve touched each other in a year. Jade feels instantly, pathetically grateful.

She climbs up beside Kit into the truck. The front seat is wide enough for the three of them, but only just, and it leads to even more touching. Kit's thigh is pressed against Jade's from her knee to her hip, warmer than the hot air that blasts into the cabin as soon as Elora starts the engine.

Kit's arm doesn't press against Jade's, because Kit's arm never stills. When she isn't using it to illustrate her words, she's fiddling with something - the heating, or she’s changing cassettes, or she's digging her blunt nails into the edge of her cast. Jade wants to take her hand, but instead she busies herself with Elora’s gingerbread cookies, her appetite coming back from the dead after the first bite.

She knows she won’t get carsick, because she knows this truck like he’s an extension of her own body. Eclipse is her truck, one she found for a few hundred bucks and spent long months learning to bash into shape. Jade sinks back into the worn leather seat as she sinks back into the memory. It had been a good a good summer, Jade proud of having academically sailed through Junior year of high school while Kit threw herself head first into anything to avoid looking down the barrel of facing hers.

That summer, the two of them had made Ballantine’s carport their second home and spent it eternally covered in oil, Kit with her sleeves rolled up, Jade with her hair tied sweaty under a series of bandannas. Airk, with the kind of dorky sincerity he applied to most of the things he said, had told them they never looked more like dykes than they did that summer, a comment that had Kit preening and had Jade struggling to know what to do with.

They’d spent a night together in the back of the truck in fall that year, laying out under the stars as they watched the lunar eclipse. Jade had just turned eighteen and, the day after her birthday, had received a letter from her birth sister. Jade had just turned eighteen and had been accepted into three out of five of her chosen colleges and was wrestling with the decision about which course her life was going to take. Which classes she was going to choose. How her life would be shaped by that decision. How the path she started to walk this year might end up shaping the world.

“What even is permaculture?” Kit had asked, lying at Jade’s side with their arms pressed together, a light duvet over their legs which - Jade had to wonder but would not ask - might have been more for the intimacy of sharing a blanket than warmth. It had been Kit’s idea, at any rate. Jade felt very, very aware of where her hands were. Where both their hands were.

“Working with nature,” Jade had replied. “Not working against it.”

Kit hummed. “Sounds like you. Remember that time we were building the treehouse with Ballantine and he said for a stronger base we’d have to cut a bit off to make space and you wouldn’t let him? It was like that branch was part of you, or something.”

Jade remembered. She and Kit had longed for a treehouse with all their hearts, a little hideout that would be just theirs where they could keep an eye on the neighbourhood without it keeping an eye on them. The thought that they would have to damage a tree that had been growing its branch longer than either of them had been alive had upset Jade so much, and the way Ballantine had gone away and redesigned the entire floor so that not only could they build around the branch, but that the branch was incorporated into the hut itself, with room for it to keep growing over the years, had overwhelmed Jade with love for him.

“Yeah,” Jade agreed, and sought out Kit’s hand to squeeze as the final sliver of moon disappeared into the shadow of the earth. “Feels like me, too.”

And it still did, even now, years later. She’d made the right choice with her major, she’d made a difference.

She'd just had to let go of Kit's hand to do it.

They pick up groceries on the way out of town, packing them neatly into cardboard boxes first and the back of the truck second. Kit seems to keep forgetting she’s only got one arm to help with. At one point, Jade hears a grunt and spins to see Kit with an entire box of red wine crammed between her left arm and her hip, and leaps to rescue it before it slips and they lose every bottle.

“I had it,” Kit protests, and immediately grabs another box one-handed to prove it. Jade watches like her eyes can prevent any disaster, and Elora slides an equally heavy box of champagne into the back of the truck - the wine cellar at the cabin is always well stocked, but Elora is nothing if not an over-caterer.

The back of the truck is open to the elements, so they tie a waterproof cover over everything. “It’s snowing a little, up on the mountain,” Elora’s words lift Jade’s heart, she loves snow so very much, and they both watch as Kit pulls a knot tight using her left hand and her little white teeth.

Jade longs to drive Eclipse again, but Elora beats her back to the driver's seat which is probably for the best; Jade’s internal clock is still on Wildwood time, her body restlessly exhausted from the long journey, her heart–

Well, she can’t tell where her heart’s at right now, but there are several hours of driving to get through for her to figure it out. Not that Jade is given much time to think, around the talking and the laughter and the music, and working her way through the supply of car snacks that Elora has squirreled into every crevice of the truck.

As they get out onto the highway, Kit and Elora fill her in on the story of the broken hand. It’s a fresh break, and if Jade still knows all of Kit’s tells, it pains Kit more than she shows. But it excites her too, and she comes to life in the telling of it.

It starts with the Harbinger, because every problem in their life that Jade has been able to gleam through sporadic phone calls and emails (the nearest internet collection was also only accessible after a hike out of the woods and into town) starts with her. Lili Harberger, the nightmare who’d ousted Sorsha from her longstanding position of mayor and was slashing services and changing policies had become the chief bad guy in the lives of everyone Jade had left behind.

The most recent disaster stems from the ceremonious installation of the new chief of police. Chief Doomes is ex-military, a vicious scumbag, and handpicked straight out of the Harbinger’s pocket. From the way Kit speaks about them both, Jade can’t tell who Kit loathes more.

Over the year, Elora has almost accidentally found herself as the figurehead of a movement against the Harbinger. Elora’s no politician - she’s working on her masters in the physics of plasma and fusion - but she has been involved in so many community organisations since high school that people trust her. People follow her, and she’s tried to bring everyone into a complex network of local groups that have been harmed by the Harbinger's policies. Now, when one organisation, one service, one neighbourhood is threatened, there are dozens of others that come when she calls.

It suits her, like her ginger hair suits her. And the way Kit has slotted into this life at her side with endless motivational, organisational, and financial support has clearly been amazing for them both. So much of Kit’s life had fit her badly when she was younger, but the way she and Elora are taking charge, together, it makes Jade so happy to see.

Happy, and a little bittersweet. Jade feels the same about her life, her work - it suits her. It's just so very far away.

Elora and Kit’s latest hand-breaking action had been a protest against Doomes opening a new police station in a building that used to be a community health hub. Raised rates and higher rents had forced each service out one at a time, dozens - including Mims - had lost their jobs and hundreds of citizens had lost access. The city establishing a stronger police presence there had been like salting a wound.

Jade is captivated and horrified and pales as she listens.

“You punched a cop?!”

“He was trying to literally carry Elora off,” Kit says, her shrug defensive, but her voice a little proud. “Of course I punched him.”

“Not all our protests end like that,” Elora reassures Jade.

Kit smiles beatifically. “We don’t start fights.”

“We finish them,” Elora’s smile is a dangerous threat.

“Besides, two hospital trips in a year isn’t bad,” Kit gives Jade a little pat on the knee, answering Jade’s wide-eyed question before she can voice it: “I made them all swear not to tell you because I knew you’d just worry, but the day Graydon got arrested I broke a couple of ribs when the cops got involved. It was a peaceful protest, before they showed up.”

“They absolutely started the fight,” confirms Elora. “But we’d just bought a camcorder so we could start to tell our own story, spread it faster across the city, you know? So we got it on film.”

“Worth it,” Kit nods.

“Absolutely worth it.”

“We’ve started making a documentary, to share Elora’s message.”

“Our message.”

“Elora thinks everything is ‘our’,” Kit leans over to whisper to Jade, conspiratorially. Jade tries not to be distracted by the way Kit’s breath feels against her cheek.

“When it comes to things like that, of course it’s ours!” Elora doesn’t take her eyes off the road, but Jade can feel her wanting to pin Kit down with a look. “I don’t like this whole - look, I understand that movements need a kind of standard-bearer and all that, but the whole point of everything we’re trying to do is unite people to work among themselves. So yeah. It’s our message. The documentary, now that’s all Kit. She’s got a good eye for a story, you know?”

“She’s always loved epic tales,” Jade says, half a hundred questions swirling in her brain about everything that’s changed in the last year, everything they’d done, but all of them overridden by the way Kit smiles wryly at Jade’s words.

It’s a soft moment, till Kit realises she’s let herself become distracted by compliments. “I just didn’t like the things people were saying about you,” she says, to Elora. “Willow was right about owning our own narrative. So like. Documentary. It was obvious.”

“It wasn’t obvious,” Elora says, with an earnestness that is both soft and irong-strong. “It needed you.”

Kit rolls her eyes, lifts her good hand, her fingers are primed so that when she says “I thought it needed us?” she can put mocking quotation marks around the final word. Elora elbows her sharply in the ribs, and Jade’s a little relieved that some things haven’t changed between them. Relieved to be met with a little familiarity. She’d been so worried that she’d been gone so long that everyone she knew would be unrecognisable, but although she’s missing a lot of the context, Kit and Elora are, after all, still Kit and Elora.

They’re starting to rise into the mountains by now, the first flecks of snow being thwump-thwump-thwumped off the windscreen by the slow rhythm of the wipers. The gradient of the road gets a little steeper and the engine hiccups.

“Easy tiger,” Kit says. Moving in tandem with Kit’s words, Jade puts her hand on the dash like she can sooth it through solid matter.

“How’s he been driving?” she asks. They’d gendered Eclipse male a long time ago, a high school protest against every feminised ship.

“Beautifully, just not usually up and down a mountain twice in a day. Hasn’t broken down once.”

“Attaboy, Eclipse,” Jade smiles at that, and Kit glances at the way her mouth curves for a moment, so briefly it’s over before Jade can be sure it happened at all.

Eclipse had, in fact, only ever broken down once since Jade had pronounced him road worthy, and it had happened halfway between Jade’s house and their senior prom. Jade remembers sitting there in the driver's seat, stunned in the white suit she was wearing as the engine turned over and over till it stopped entirely, till the only sound that was left was the downpour of rain gushing over the windscreen and Kit’s laughter turning slightly hysterical. The only reason Kit was even attending prom was because she’d overheard some of their classmates betting that she wouldn’t.

Jade could have freaked - Jade’s anxiety over what was wrong with the truck and how to save them both from being stranded could have swamped the whole night but Kit had just laughed, and said, in a rough sing-song voice, “isn’t it ironic?” till she’d dragged Jade into singing one of Kit’s very best karaoke songs. All of Jade’s anxiety had unravelled as she gripped her hands on the steering wheel and braced her arms and threw her head back to sing, to wail “it figures!” at the top of their lungs.

There’s a little village they pass through before the final ascent up the mountainside. Snow has settled here in curved banks on the side of the road and warm yellow lights spill out of every quiet window. Elora pulls over at the only gas station in town, it’s closed this late in the evening but they need shelter, not gas. Jade’s fingers ache in the cold as she wraps the wheels in chains so they can handle the worst of the road to come, and she hasn’t thought to miss this particular feeling but it brings with it the memory of every Christmas holiday for the past decade, and there’s something in the ache of it that feels almost close to coming home.

Jade’s had so many homes in her life. Her mother’s home, the group home, four fosters before Ballantine, her dorm room and then the flats in college, and this year the small bungalow she’d shared with Scorpia and Boorman. She’s resilient, she’d overheard her social worker tell Ballantine on their first visit to his place, she knows how to make a home wherever she lands. The words had staggered Jade; all through her life she’d never been able to believe in the permanence of any one place, and time after time had proven her right - homes were lost or left behind, over and over again. She did not know how to make a home, she just knew how not to make a fuss.

But of all the places in the world, the cabin reassured her more than most. It didn't change. Year after year it was here on the side of the mountain, unthreatened and stable, warm and inviting, and year after year she came here with Kit, with the whole extended family.

Jade finishes up with her tyre and stands up, trying to shake herself out of her thoughts. “Need a hand?” She throws the offer to Elora, but Elora’s also an expert at chains by now so when Elora throws her a thumbs up Jade steps out from under the shelter and looks out in the dark. Snow whirls gently, caught in the light, but beyond the edge of the gas station the whole world falls away into a starless, adumbral liminality.

Jade closes her eyes as snow hits her sunburned face where she’s still carrying the warmth of the Wildwood in her skin. The contrast of the cold helps wake her up. It’s just tiredness and the end of a long journey that’s bringing the melancholia with it, she tells herself. She just needs a sleep. She’ll be alright after a sleep.

A little movement catches her eye as Kit shifts in the corner of her vision, and Jade turns her head to see Kit watching her. Jade’s reminded of last winter when they’d stopped here on their way up the mountain, of the grin on Kit’s face as they pulled each other around the side of the building and Jade pushed her up against the cage of bagged firewood for sale and kissed her till they heard Airk leaning on the horn, and then for a long, slow moment after. She thinks of the way Kit’s eyes dropped to her mouth in the truck. She wonders how tense and strange the moment might be if Elora wasn’t right there with them.

She should say something, but she doesn’t, and neither does Kit. Instead Kit shatters the moment with a snowball, thrown with her left hand but exploding onto Jade’s shoulder with deadly aim.

The last leg of the journey is short and slow and steep, and Kit spends it all complaining about the snow Jade shoved down the back of her shirt. Jade is unrepentant. Everyone in the truck knows Kit had it coming, broken hand or no, and Kit is clearly delighting in the excuse to whine about her wet and clammy shirt. Jade grins, it feels good, a little more like it’s supposed to.

She’s still grinning when they round the final corner of the single lane, tree-lined road and there it is, a sight that settles Jade’s heart. To call it a log cabin is misleading, but the Tanthalos family has always lived an oversized kind of life - Kit’s childhood home is basically a castle - and so the luxury holiday house on the side of the mountain has always just been known at the cabin.

Two stories high, it has large windows on every side to take in the mountain views. The tallest window to the east catches part of the ski slopes not far off, and to the north you can see all the way down the mountain and into the glittery lights of the town. To the south and west the mountains are covered with an endless blanket of trees.

Every inch of its wooden exterior gives Jade the impression of warmth even without the golden glow of the light spilling out of the circular window of the front door. Fairy lights are twisted around every beam of the sheltered porch, and a fresh wreath hangs on the door - entwined with more lights around the shiny green of the holly. The ekkelberries look so brightly red they might be magical; Jade recognises Elora’s handiwork in all of it. “How long have you two been here already?”

“Just since this morning,” Elora said chirpily, shutting the engine off.

The sudden quiet and stillness floods in, broken by Kit as she undoes her seatbelt. She adds in a tone dryer than Elora’s: “early, early this morning.”

“Don’t get your hopes up, we haven’t decorated a thing inside. We were waiting till we had more than three arms between us before we started on the tree, so you’re going to get put to work as soon as you’ve slept off the flight. Willow and Mims should be here tomorrow night and Sorsha and Airk and - whoever Airk’s bringing this year?”

“Kristen,” Kit jumps out of the truck, hitting the ground in the middle of the girl’s name. “He can’t stop talking about her since she beat him at lacrosse.”

“Mmmhm. And Graydon is hitching a ride down with them as well, getting in the next morning. Not that you can call first class travel with Sorsha hitching, but. This place should be packed in two days' time.”

“How is Graydon?” Jade jumps on the opportunity to ask as they start untying the cover over the back of the truck. “Jail time can’t have been easy on him.”

Elora and Kit are both quiet, for a moment. Silence has always been telling, with the two of them. “It was rough on him, yeah,” Elora says, grabbing two bags of groceries. Jade goes for one of the boxes of wine before Kit can.

“He went a little dark on us for a bit,” Kit continues. “But he volunteered to talk about his experiences for the documentary. The fucking Harbinger said some things to him when he was in there that you wouldn’t believe.”

“We all need a bit of a break, this year,” Elora says. “Breathe the mountain air, throw ourselves down some ski slopes, drink buttered rum for breakfast, prune ourselves in the hot tub, you know? It’ll be good for everyone.”

“Aaaaand,” Kit adds in a singsong voice as she reaches the front door, trailing her fingers over a notch in the wood in the dead centre of Elora’s wreath. “Silas and Libby are coming.”

Jade can’t help but grin back even harder, the expression stretching into her cold cheeks. Silas and Libby are perhaps her favourite couple in the whole entire world. The way they adore each other is so solid it almost makes Jade believe in marriage, even though the violent disaster of her own parents, and the heartaching trainwreck of Kit’s, has coloured her attitude on that social institution all her life. But Silas and Libby are a unit, partners and lovers and friends, and maybe that’s the way to do it, Jade thinks, maybe that’s the three-part recipe to make sure the world doesn’t break you.

On top of that, they’re fun. Libby has introduced them both to the wildest, darkest, strangest, raunchiest, funniest novels, and the first winter they spent here with ‘don’t call me uncle, you little shits’ Silas, he’d taught them both how to whittle and, when no one else was watching, how to throw knives. A number of trees still bear the marks of their increasingly accurate aim, and one nick dead centre in the front door - right in the middle of where the wreath hangs now. Jade touches her fingers to it reverently, and passes into the cabin.

The rest of the evening vanishes in a blur of cold roast chicken and salad sandwiches and fruit mince pies topped off with a nightcap of spiced and honey-sweetened mulled wine. It’s barely nine by the time Jade's pulled on her pyjamas but she's almost too exhausted to think. Lying down flat is such a blissful experience she groans, stretching out under the fresh sheets and heavy woollen blankets. She can hear Kit and Elora talking in the kitchen as they wash dishes, and she’d love more than almost anything to be down there with them, catching up, but she has twelve whole days here, there’s time. She tells herself there’s time as all her exhaustion finally catches up with her and plunges her deep into the dark.

It’s bright outside when she wakes, and the house smells of warm spices and woodsmoke. Jade spends a little while in the cocoon of warmth she’s created in her sleep, looking out the gap in the curtains at the snow covered pine trees outside the window. It's not easy to tell the time through the overcast sky; it's probably late morning, but she’s not quite ready to get up yet. Memories slink back as she wakes up more, ones she managed not to think about through all the exhaustion of yesterday.

Memories she’s tried not to think about all year.

”If you want to go there, after graduation, to live... I would tag along, if that’s okay. ‘Cause… I don’t want to have any adventures, unless they’re with you.”

“‘Tag along’? You can't… you can’t uproot your whole life just to tag along with mine.”

“Why not? Don't you want me around?”

“Of course I want you around, but it’s not that simple. It’s not a drive out to the lake, I’m going to help my sister’s village rebuild after a war. It’s going to be serious work. Hard work.”

“I know that - obviously I know that. You think I’m scared of hard?”

“You just called it an ‘adventure,’ Kit.”

“It would be an adventure! Anything with you is an adventure! Besides, I’m kinda thinking of dropping out of college anyway.”

“Don’t you DARE-”

“I’ll dare if I want.”

“You’re not following me across the world, Kit. You’re staying here and finishing school and if you drop out just to follow me I will-”

“You’ll what?”

“I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Augh - Jade! I don’t care about school, okay? All I care about is you.”

“I know! That's what I'm worried about.”

“Well stop. I don’t need you worrying about me. I can make my own choices.”

“Yeah, you always do. I'm telling you this is a bad one.”

“How could being with you be bad?!”

“I don't want to mess up your life, Kit! You have to stay, you have to finish school.”

“I don't have to do anything. God! You know what? Fuck you, Jade, and never ‘forgiving yourself’ for my choices. Fuck you very much.”

The argument never changes no matter how many times she plays it over in her head, but Jade lies awake, reliving it one more time, just to make sure.

She hears soft footsteps moving up the hall and knows it’s Elora because Kit doesn’t walk that lightly. Kit can tiptoe silently, when the need arises, but day to day she likes to make herself heard. The footsteps stop outside Jade’s door, and Elora doesn’t knock, but Jade starts to smell the rich aroma of fresh, dark coffee. She’s filled with again with deep fondness for Elora and this gentlest wake up call she could imagine.

“Alright,” she calls, and finally pushes herself out of her nest. “I can smell you, come in.”

“Morning sunshine!” Elora’s voice is grinning. “I’m making gingerbread pancakes. Please let me feed you!”

Jade rips open the door, absolutely willing to let the magic of Elora’s jentacular delights fight off feelings she doesn’t know how to change.

The days before Christmas, Jade’s always known, are some of Kit’s favourite. This hasn’t changed. Kit has clearly been up for ages, dragging boxes upon boxes of Christmas paraphernalia out of the attic, and the living room looks like it’s been hit with an explosion. The strings of lights are tangled with tinsel and half a dozen mismatched baubles have already rolled across the floor.

Jade’s always enjoyed this time too. She loves a goal and a clear deadline and the feeling of balancing multiple tasks at once, likes turning a space into something inviting and frivolous for a collection of some of her favourite people. There’s a lot of satisfaction and fun to be found in doing a job with a drink in her hand and a headband sporting a spray of golden stars so tall she has to be careful ducking through doorways.

Breakfast - brunch really - is over, and the drink in question is Jade’s second coffee, heavily dosed with whiskey and whipped cinnamon cream. From Kit’s energy levels, Jade suspects that Kit is several cups deeper into the day than she is. With fuel in their mugs, they survey the task before them, the undecorated tree and the bannisters and the windows and the fireplace and every un-mistletoed doorway. Kit throws Elora a star for her to ram - Kit’s word - onto the top of the tree, and they’re deep into an argument over whether the star should go on first or last when the phone starts ringing out in the hallway.

“You feeling alright?” Elora asks Jade, once Kit has stomped out of the room to answer it. “You’re quiet.”

“I’m always quiet compared to you two,” Jade says, and is met with Elora’s gaze. She’s mastered the perfect balance of skeptical and patient, of fond and infuriated. “I’m jetlagged,” Jade insists. “Rack off.”

“Mmmhm,” Elora says, the wordless sound speaking volumes as she hides the star.

“Welp!” Kit thumps back into the room and flops herself dramatically onto a chair where something jingles when she lands. “It’s snowing so hard they’ve closed the highway. Airk says they’re not gonna be able to get through for a few days.”

It’s a damper on their spirits, for a moment. “There’s still five days before Christmas,” Elora points out. “The snow’ll clear before then.”

“Uh huh. You’re a meteorologist now too?”

Elora turns the same look on Kit that she’d been giving to Jade. “Just one of my many skills.”

Kit huffs. Elora rolls her eyes. Jade grows formlessly anxious about the future.

“Well, you know what this means?” Elora asks. “It means no one's going to be crowding up my kitchen for a couple of days. There’s time to make my own bread for breadcrumbs for the stuffing instead of using the shitty pre-dried stuff! Oh! I could make cassoulet!”

Jade watches in awe as Elora, spirits utterly undamped, darts cheerfully back into the kitchen. And then for the first time, she and Kit are alone.

For the first time, maybe in their whole lives, it’s awkward. Jade sets her mug down on a box of glitter-glued pinecones they made when they were preteens, looking after Elora.

“Well… she’s unstoppable.”

“Ridiculous, isn't she?” Kit scoffs. “Who needs to be a kitchen sorceress and a weather wizard when you’re already a community leader and plasma physicist and, apparently, the expert on tree decoration. Where the hell did she put my star?!”

That’s all it takes for the quiet to be broken, and then Kit’s off, telling another story about how over the top Elora is. As they start to untangle countless yards of colourful lights, Jade comes back with a story of her own about her sister - they both have so, so many other people to talk about. Boorman in particular is excellent anecdote fodder, Jade finds.

It starts to feel like maybe they haven't spent a year apart. Jade begins to loosen, and laugh, and when she's done with her drink Kit dives on making them both another. The afternoon passes as the house slowly fills with layer after layer of new smells from the kitchen.

They don't talk about other relationships, and it worries Jade. Jade's own lack of other relationships worries Jade sometimes. She's met a couple of people in the Wildwood who interested her, who smiled and flirted. There was a budding queer community who published their own newsletter and one woman had interviewed Jade for a story on the work she was doing there, and afterwards had invited her to go for a hike. It had been nice, but Jade’s mind or heart or the knot of fear that was its own organ inside her had spent the whole time going but, but, but…

When they’d said their goodbyes Jade had drawn out the too-clear moment where a kiss could have been but wasn’t. She’d agreed to a second date with the hope of doing better next time and had slumped back to the bungalow feeling broken, because what if she committed and what if they fell in love and what would that mean when she went back to Tir Alseen and the panic of it all - it freaked her out.

Maybe a relationship would be easier to get into if she knew Kit was in one first. But Kit doesn't mention anything or anyone, and Jade is a coward and doesn't ask.

The question doesn’t leave her mind though, and later when she’s peeling potatoes with Elora for dinner - while Kit naps off her drinks in the other room - she asks Elora about her own dating life and listens to stories of Charlie and Panda and Scout, all spoken about so casually, so easily.

“How do you even find the space in your life for like… dating,” Jade wonders out loud, and she knows this is a dangerous thing to do around Elora but she can’t help it.

“Honestly,” Elora shrugs. “I say to myself, I’d like to go on a date this weekend, and then I figure out a way to make it happen.”

She turns her eyes on Jade, and there it is, the honesty that's dangerous because Elora expects it to be contagious. “I was surprised that you weren’t in Kit’s room last night,” she says. “You two always used to share a bed here.”

“But that wasn’t - that was never because - we weren’t - aren't -dating.” Jade stammers. “We're friends.”

Elora looks at her and it’s unbearable. This look, whoever it’s been coming from, has always been unbearable.

“Yeah, she didn't talk non-stop about you all year because you're just friends,” Elora says, and Jade glowers at her.

It's been a common line all through their lives. An infuriating one, full of misunderstanding on the part of everyone else. Jade remembers too clearly when Scorpia and Boorman had come to visit during Jade's first year in college and Boorman had asked, stunned, “You’re just friends? Why leave it there - you two clearly have the hots for each other,” and they’d both tripped over words till Kit had pretended Airk was calling for her and disappeared and, like a dog with a bone, Boorman had pointed out that Kit had chosen ‘Head Over Feet’ as her karaoke song and Jade had gotten very defensive and said that it was only because Alanis Morissette had dragged them through high school together and actually Kit’s voice was just super suited to the song and he was being a completely predictable pop psychologist if he thought karaoke song choices conveyed any hidden meaning because they didn’t.

And then she’d gone to hide in the bathroom so she didn’t have to sing Iris with his face all there and stupid and beardy and thinking he knew things that he most certainly didn’t. Sometimes I'd give up forever to touch you was just a good line in a song!

Just friends always shitted her. Just. There was no just about their friendship – they loved each other so deeply. Their lives had been shaped by each other. It was an offence to everything they were to describe them as just friends. Like their friendship wasn’t enough.

Kit - their friendship - was the heart of Jade’s very life and if anything messed it up, Jade didn’t know how she’d handle it. Jade didn’t know how Kit would handle it.

It didn’t mean that there hadn’t been plenty a party where their dancing had turned into pulling each other into corners or unoccupied rooms and making out. Two Halloweens ago Jade (dressed as an undead circus ringleader) had fingered Kit (dressed as Eric Draven) in a linen closet and had to wear a scarf for a week to cover up the bite mark Kit had left on her neck trying to be quiet. Later when Kit was playing roadie for Airk’s band she’d dragged Jade into the back of the van and returned the favour.

Sometimes they didn’t even need a party. Last year in this very cabin they’d been left alone to do the dishes and Kit had whipped Jade with her tea towel and Jade had thrown a coffee mug of warm soapy water at her in retaliation and Kit had pushed Jade back into the sink and Jade had pushed Kit harder back into the pantry door, her hand squeezing the soapy, soaked shirt clinging to Kit’s breast. And Jade was a little bit obsessed with Kit’s chest, the way she could hide it so well some days and then others… there they were.

They were friends, but they were also… good at letting things get out of hand, that was all. They were good at having a good time together.

Just because Jade had stolen the tea towel from Kit, bound Kit’s hands above her head so she couldn't stop Jade pushing up Kit’s top and sucking on Kit’s breast while Kit ground against her thigh till she came (finishing just before the others came back, finishing in time for Kit to pull a sweater over her soaked shirt and for Jade to plunge her hands back into the sink and scrub at a pot hard enough to disguise the red blossoming on her face) didn’t mean they were dating, or anything.

Besides, the things they got up to weren’t ever the reason they'd shared a bed here. Aside from one significant time, fooling around was for kitchen and closets and treehouses and vans, and bed was for whispering the night away till they wore themselves out talking.

Jade doesn’t know how to explain all that to Elora. “I think I need a nap before dinner too,” she says, knowing how obvious it is that she’s bailing. “It’s like, three in the morning in the Wildwood.”

“Couch is big enough for two,” Elora says, smiling, teasing.

Jade looks through the door into the living room at the couch in question, where Kit is sprawled and gently snoring. “Not the way Kit sleeps.”

When Jade wakes again it’s to pitch darkness and a shot of adrenaline that has her groping in alarm through the bed around her, trying to work out where she is. Her hand finds the touch lamp, and the irrational but far too potent fear of the unknown is banished by the sudden, soft light. Jade gasps air deep into her belly. She’s alright. She’s just in the cabin.

She has no idea what has woken her, maybe the sheeting of icy rain hurling itself on her window, and no idea what time it is, but the darkness and quiet of the cabin around her suggest she slept long past dinner. Maybe it’s hunger that woke her, hunger has always been bound tight with anxiety in her body.

But then from the hallway, something moves, and Jade's spine locks into an iron bar. She tells herself it's the wind, which works until it doesn't: the wind doesn't know how to open the front door.

Her anxiety sharpens as it launches her into action, untangling herself from her blankets and wrapping the uppermost, thick knitted comforter around her like a cape. She has no slippers, and her thick socks are silent on the floor as she steps out into the hall, looking all the way down it just in time to see Kit disappearing out into the snowy night.

“Oi, Kit!” Jade calls, alarm piercing her voice as she scrambles after her. Kit doesn’t turn, and Jade’s had enough sleepovers with Kit to know she sleepwalks. Jade has spent many nights gently extracted her from dark rooms all over the Tanthalos manor, easing her back in through windows and once, terrifyingly, hauling her bodily out of her mom’s car while Kit wailed on Jade’s shoulder Let me go! I know I can find him!

Kit’s still in her pyjamas but her Doc Martins are laced up over the flannel, and her boots crunch down onto the snow as she steps off the porch. Jade calls her name again, slapping on the lights as she races past the switch. She has to squint against the sudden brightness and the storm throwing sleet into her face, but that discomfort is nothing compared to the way the snow bites into her as she follows Kit down into it. It’s more than ankle deep, and feels like a bear trap snapping into the skin above her socks that pyjamas just can’t protect.

Jaw clenched against the cold, Jade darts into Kit’s path. Kit looks a fright, ferociously so, and Jade would love to get her hands on anyone who pissed off Kit enough that she looks like this.

“I’m here, Kit,” she says, spreading her arms to stop Kit walking any further out into the dark and snowy woods. “It’s your Jade, I’m here.”

“We can’t let her take any fucking more, Jade,” Kit hisses as she tries to twist past. Jade steps closer, enclosing them both in her blanket cape.

“It’s alright,” Jade promises, as Kit makes a stressed whine of protest. “We’re not going to let her take anything, but that’s the wrong way. We need to head this way, alright?” She coaxes, teeth chattering. The cold feels like it’s jabbing actual needles into her feet as she turns Kit around - careful, so careful of her broken hand - and guides them back toward the steps. Kit stomps and mutters to herself until she hits the welcome mat and starts to kick snow off her boots. She pauses, mid kick, staring down at her feet.

“I’m… in pyjamas?” she asks, her voice brittle as she turns to look at Jade. She looks young, as little as she looked when Jade first met her, and Jade cups her cheeks in her freezing hands and wants to bite back the confusion and disorientation with the edge of her teeth.

“You were dreamin,” she says, her voice as soft as she can make it. “Just a dream, and you were going for a wander. You’re alright though now, you’re wakin’ up.”

“Shit,” says Kit, a croak in her voice. It’s followed quickly by a look of horror as she takes in how deep Jade’s shudders of cold are. “Oh my Jade, you’re in socks.”

“I can’t believe you’re in boots,” Jade exclaims, trying badly not to think about her own feet. “Did you do your laces up with your teeth?! Bloody hell.”

“I don’t know, probably,” Kit groans, and lifts her broken hand to her face. She stops when she realises what she’s doing, groans again in an added layer of frustration and uses her left hand to rake through her hair instead.

“You incredible muppet. Here,” Jade says, wrapping the blanket tightly around Kit’s shoulders. She makes sure it’s settled before she drops to her knees to unlace Kit’s boots. It’s not easy, her own hands are trembling and her fingertips numb, but she pushes on through. “The fire’s probably still banked, do you want to warm up there or go back to bed?”

“Bed.”

“Bed, we can do bed. Lift your foot?” Jade holds the loosened boot down, and Kit pulls herself free. She reaches down with her good hand, steading herself on Jade’s shoulder. Jade pictures herself as a tree, rooted deep in the earth, steady and supportive and strong enough to handle the cold. She stands again and starts to guide them back down the corridor toward their bedrooms, but Kit turns before she gets to her door and walks straight into Jade’s room instead, shedding the wet blanket on the floor before crawling into Jade's bed.

It’s not worth arguing about and not even worth questioning, it’s too cold and Kit obviously needs her, it doesn’t matter where they’re at. Jade peels off her wet socks and pulls on a dry pair before burrowing down under the blankets too. Kit wriggles about, as though trying to dig deeper into the sheets, squirms closer to Jade and turns around. Jade does the only thing possible for her to do in that moment and wraps herself around Kit like the biggest, safest, warmest spoon she can imagine.

“Have you been sleepwalking much?” Jade asks quietly, as Kit tugs a handful of blanket up under her chin.

“A bit,” Kit says, in the same tone she’d used to talk about her broken hand, her broken ribs. “Not loads.”

“Uh huh,” Jade lets her have this, tucks her knees a little tighter behind Kit’s, loops her arm around Kit’s stomach. It’s nice, curled up with Kit in bed again. It’s warm, it’s so comfortable, the way they fit together. Jade’s glad of the excuse of the cold, to draw Kit’s body up against hers. She’s never felt more like she was exactly where she was supposed to be than when she was given the chance to guard Kit’s sleep.

“Goodnight, Kit,” she whispers. Kit doesn’t reply, and if it wasn’t for the fact that Jade can feel the way she’s breathing, Jade might have thought she’d already slipped back into sleep. But Jade knows what it feels like when Kit falls asleep in her arms, and this isn’t it.

“Jade,” Kit says, shuffling around in the bed till her warm breath touches Jade's face. “Can - can I kiss you? We don’t have to, or, don’t have to talk about it, it doesn’t have to mean anything… I just…” Her fingers reach out in the dark, and Jade feels the cool press of a fingertip against her bottom lip. “Can I?”

Jade knows if she kisses Kit now, she's never going to stop. And she knows just as well that she has to. They live on opposite sides of the world and Jade’s life there is pulling her back in eleven days time but Jade aches for it and Jade longs for it and her lips are already parting softly under Kit’s fingertip and there’s just a little light coming in from outside where Jade’s forgotten to turn off the porch light so Kit’s face is gently illuminated and her eyes are soft and dark in shadow. Jade can see, perfectly, the way her lips part, like she already knows what Jade is going to do, and before Jade can think any more, she’s doing it. She’s leaning forward and pressing her lips against Kit’s, she’s curling her hand around the back of Kit’s neck.

From there, there’s no going back. She can’t take back a kiss, any more than she could promise that it isn’t going to mean anything, because it will always, always, mean something to her. Kit’s lips are still chilly but Jade warms them with her tongue; Kit’s fingertips are cold as they sink into Jade’s hair and pull her even closer.

More than anything else ever has: kissing Kit feels like coming home. Jade whispers her name and Kit’s soft whine in response sounds like home, Jade kisses her neck and presses her nose behind Kit’s ear and the smell of her skin and her hair unlocks a cacophony of memories of every time her heart ever felt at home in Kit’s company.

Kit kissed her for the very first time in a bunk bed in this cabin, before they’d all been replaced with doubles and queens. They’d tucked blankets beneath the mattress of the top bunk to make a warm, dark little fort in the bottom, and had been reading one of Libby’s books by torchlight. The sex scene had been pretty tame by later standards, but Jade remembers it well, remembers the way the cattle rancher’s hand had slid over the milkmaid’s stomach and cupped her breast, remembers the description of a nipple perking under thin fabric. Mostly, she remembers the way Kit had giggled, nervously, and how Jade had lingered over the sound as she’d lingered over that passage while she waited for Kit to catch up. Jade’s fingers had been primed to turn the page out of habit but Kit hadn’t said her usual ‘done’, and Jade didn’t rush her, because the image of someone else’s fingertips feeling a nipple through warm, soft cotton was one Jade found herself so very drawn to.

Kit had looked up at her, her cheeks pink, and the nervous giggle faded from her face as she dropped her eyes to Jade’s lips, and then kissed her over the open pages of the book.

“Do you want to see what it’s like?” Kit had asked, whisper-quiet in their warm den, her hand playing at the hem of Jade’s hoodie leaving no question about what she was talking about. Jade had nodded, a lot, and Kit’s hand had slid up against her skin, under her hoodie, under her shirt, up over the panting warmth of her stomach to the edge of her bra.

And then Kit’s hand had been pressed against her breast, and she’d squeezed, and the rancher in the novel hadn’t squeezed but oh, Jade was so, so glad Kit was going off book. She squeezed, and Jade moaned, and Kit giggled again which made Jade giggle too, a gaspy, breathy kind of sound.

When Kit had circled her nipple with her fingers, Jade had held her breath entirely. “It’s so hard,” Kit had whispered, in wonder. “How does it feel?”

“So - so good,” Jade had breathed, finally opening her eyes and feeling her pupils blow at the sight of Kit watching her hand moving under Jade’s clothes. “Can I - do you want me to - touch you?”

“Yeah,” Kit had replied, her voice small, and quiet, and she’d gone quieter still as Jade shifted against her, her whole forearm disappearing up under Kit’s top. Carefully, Jade traced her fingers over the fabric of Kit’s singlet, circling her nipple first with a finger, then with her thumb.

When they’d kissed again, each with a hand up each other's top, it had been so open, so easy, bodies speaking in a way words couldn’t, muffled, urgent little noises against each others mouths until Sorsha had banged on the bedroom door and told them it was time to wash up for dinner.

They’d never given the book back to Libby. As far as Jade knew, it was still on Kit’s bookshelf in her bedroom.

It took them a few nights to do more than kiss, to creep hands into each other's pants. The cabin was never empty, and at night sounds seemed to carry. Jade was sure Sorsha would hear them kissing while she walked down the hall to the bathroom, sure that someone was going to barge in and swing the door wide open. But kissing Kit - touching Kit - being touched by Kit - felt too exciting to stop, and on their last night before they had to leave and get back into Tir Asleen before school started up again, Kit had promised she’d be so, so quiet, and Jade had slid her hand down towards-

The book had called it the milkmaid’s ‘tender box’, and of course Jade knew the proper terminology but that's all that swam into her head, in that moment. And Kit… Kit felt so tender, there, radiating so much warmth through the damp cotton of her underwear. Impossibly, impossibly tender. Jade traced the shape of her, pressed into the shape of her, fascinated as the space between her own legs throbbed, and when Kit whispered that she could keep going, please keep going, Jade had held her breath in reverence.

People at school talked about virginity all the time, like it was a prize to be taken or something to lose. Jade always thought it was a bit silly, she’d read enough books about the facts of it to be able to snap back at some of the boys who’d been talking shit about hymens, and she didn’t think that anyone, really, could be that changed after being touched by someone else. But that was before she touched Kit, before she discovered that yes, okay, the elastic waistband of Kit’s stripey hipster cut briefs was absolutely some sort of Rubicon, because after Jade had finally ventured inside Kit's underwear, her fingers had never been the same since.

They hadn’t tried anything like that one they got back to Tir Asleen, not for ages. Jade didn’t know if it was just a winter thing, just a cabin thing, just a game they’d been playing because of the book… and didn’t ask, because what if she told Kit she wanted more, and Kit thought that meant their friendship wasn’t enough as it was? How did you admit to wanting more when what you already had was the best thing in your life? So Jade has squashed the wanting down, where it wouldn't risk hurting anyone.

They hadn’t kissed again till the night of prom, after the tow truck had arrived to rescue them from the side of the road. They’d stayed in the truck, one of Jade’s hands on the wheel to help guide it, the other gripping Kit’s as she worried about what was wrong and if it was fixable, and Kit had leaned over and kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her, and hadn’t stopped kissing her till they got to the mechanics, where they’d both climbed out of the truck and hadn’t said a word about it.

And they hadn’t talked about what having sex in the closet at the halloween party meant, or Airk’s van, or the kitchen’s cabin, or any of the other places they’d crashed into each other. Each time it happened it felt like it’d be weirder and weirder to say, hey, what is this? And so Jade… didn’t. It was what it was and what it was was a gift and Jade’s life had taught her well enough to know you didn’t question gifts.

And then out of nowhere last winter Kit had told Jade she’d uproot herself and drop out of college and move halfway across the world to be with her and only then did Jade realise that maybe if either of them had said something a little earlier she might have freaked out a little less, but Jade has always been a creature of habits and silence has always been her worst one.

They’ve always been good at kissing, though. If nothing else, they’re amazing at that, and there’s a fear in Jade’s heart because she doesn’t want to hurt Kit, ever, ever, and she knows when Kit grabs onto something she doesn’t let go easily, and Kit’s holding onto her so, so tightly and it’s going to be a mess in the morning or in a week but - but they’re here in the cabin again and they’re almost entirely alone on this mountainside and what if, just for tonight, Jade lets herself hold on too? What if Jade lets their lips and their bodies slot together in a way that makes the broken puzzle of her heart finally start to feel like a picture.

Kit notices Jade’s crying before Jade does, when a fat tear drops suddenly from Jade’s cheek onto Kit’s. “Hey,” Kit lifts her hand, brushes Jade’s wet cheek with her thumb. “What’s this about?”

“Nothing - I missed you,” Jade whispers, trying to blink more back. “I just missed you a lot.”

“I missed you too.” There’s an ache in Kit’s face Jade feels the echo of in her chest. Missing each other doesn’t cover it, and perhaps both of them know that. “Do you want to stop? We can stop-”

“I don’t want to stop,” the words fall out of Jade’s mouth as she works her way down Kit’s neck in a series of kisses. “I want to go down on you.”

“Oh,” she hears Kit breathe, feels Kit tip her throat open beneath Jade’s mouth. “Oh, I would definitely be okay with that.”

Jade buries her face in the warmest place possible, beneath heavy blankets and between Kit’s thighs, and when she drags her tongue up the full length of Kit’s slit she sends a little mental apology to all the work Elora’s doing on so much wonderful food, because Jade knows she’s ruining her tongue for all other flavours.

And if a few more tears slip out of her eyes, well, they’re caught safely by Kit’s already wet curls before anyone can notice.

By the time Jade finally lifts her face, Kit has kicked all the blankets off her body. She lies there, sprawled beneath Jade, legs open, broken hand thrown aside, the other hooked around her own throat as her lungs heave for breath. At some point she must have slapped on the touch lamp and Jade’s so grateful she has because Kit is a sight like this, flushed and beautiful.

“Holy shit Jade,” she whispers. “You missed me alright.”

Jade laughs against the soft skin of her thigh, and when Kit draws her back up to the pillows and kisses her once more Jade feels her mouth ruined all over again by the taste of Kit’s come against Kit’s own tongue. When Kit rolls, Jade lets her, her whole body pulsing with want beneath Kit as Kit straddles her, holds her down with one hand. Jade is still entirely in pyjamas but she can feel the wet warmth of Kit soaking through the flannel as she rolls her hips against Jade’s thigh.

“Keep going,” Jade urges, bending her knee to give Kit a better angle, her hands reaching for Kit’s hips. “Ride me, yes Kit. Get yourself off on me.”

Kit arches her body against Jade and whines and Jade tries to lock it in her mind to keep for the rest of time.

And then- “No,” Kit says, and everything about Jade feels like it’s stopping. “No,” Kit continues, and there’s a wildly pleased look on her face as she leans over Jade. “Or - later. Right now, I want to make you come.”

Jade’s heart starts up again, but now it feels like it’s racing to catch up.

“You wanna?” Kit asks, running her good hand down the buttons keeping Jade’s pyjama top closed till she finds the sensitive skin of Jade’s stomach.

“I wanna,” Jade replies, breathlessly, as Kit’s fingers creep a little lower.

Kit grins like a wolf. “Wait there then,” she says, and then she’s gone.

She’s gone, and Jade’s body is bereft, her mind stunned. She pushes herself up on her elbows to stare after Kit who has vanished - utterly naked - across the hall. Outside, the wind sends a splattering of wet snow against her window, and Jade shivers - suddenly remembering it’s the dead of winter now that there’s no hot body pressed against her to help ward it off.

Kit reappears moments later and closes the door firmly behind her. Jade’s eyes widen as she sits up properly: in Kit’s hand is a vibrator. It’s a big one, wand white as the snow, and with a cord to plug into the wall hanging over Kit’s arm.

This time, Kit’s grin is so diabolical she could outdance the devil himself. She approaches the bed, approaches Jade, and Jade can feel her cunt clench desperately at the sound of Kit plugging the toy into the wall, and flicking on the switch. Jade’s up on her knees and not quite sure how she got there, but Kit joins her on her knees as well, right in front of her.

“I wasn’t going to bring this…” Kit says, and she’s just a little nervous beneath the smile on her face, but she’s always liked knocking Jade off balance and is clearly living for it. “But then I broke my hand, right? And I thought… well, I deserve it?”

“Yeah,” the words fall out of Jade’s lips. “Yeah, you do.”

Kit lays the wand on one of the pillows, and Jade can see the dent it makes with its weight and her imagination leaps. She had a little vibrator herself, in college, but she’d retired it when she left the country because the idea of bringing it with her made her nervous in a way she didn’t want to examine. She’s never used one with anyone else before. She’s never had anyone else use one on her.

And this one looks so mighty.

“And you deserve it,” Kit adds, and Jade’s reply turns into nothing more than a stammer. Kit shifts a little closer and Jade kisses her again, because that’s easier, because that’s better, because the feel of Kit’s toothy grin under Jade’s lips is wonderful. “You do, don’t you?” Kit keeps pushing, between kisses, pressing the vibrator’s hard stillness up against Jade’s belly. “Haven’t you been such a good girl all year?”

“Who are you, Santa?” Jade manages to groan, and she knows she’s not following the script to the sexy degree she’d like to be able to, but the thought of admitting she thinks she deserves this makes her stomach twist.

“I could be,” Kit’s still having fun with it. “Do you want Santa to fuck you?”

“I want you,” Jade blurts, and Kit kisses her so deeply, presses her body up against her so hard, and Jade’s never been attracted to the idea of cocks but the sensation that Kit has one pressing hard and huge and ready up against her is driving her out of her mind.

Kit pulls back from the kiss, and hooks a couple of fingers from the hand holding the vibrator between two buttons of Jade’s pyjama top. “Take this off then?” she says, the faintest hint of a question at the end of the suggestion, and Jade remembers she has arms. She discards it somewhere over the side of the bed and a shiver of cold air creeps gooseflesh over Jade’s arms. Her nipples are already hard, the cold, or Kit’s closeness, or both working in tandem.

“Oh fuck,” Kit whispers, her eyes on the curves of Jade’s breasts, her mouth slightly open. For a moment there’s stillness between them, apart from the rise and fall of Jade’s chest as she fails to breathe like a normal person. “You’re unbelievably hot.”

“‘Mm, no. Have you seen these goosebumps?”

“Yeah, I’m looking,” Kit is, unashamedly, looking at her like every christmas has come at once. She dips her head to run her tongue around the bumps circling Jade’s nipple just as she flicks her thumb to switch the wand on, revving like an engine. Jade bites both her lips together, and it's good that she does because when Kit presses the vibrator against the inside of her thigh and starts to move it upwards, she moans so loud it rivals the howl of the wind outside.

“Take off your pants and lie back,” Kit’s voice is so low and commanding it burrows its way into Jade’s psyche and she can feel a memory forming, these words in this tone speaking the hottest sentence she’s ever heard. But Jade whines instead of moving, canting her hips against the head of the vibrator. One hand fists in the back of Kit’s hair, the other grips her upper arm, mouth open, eyes closed.

“Can’t-” she gasps, so sensitive the idea of moving makes her feel like she might die. “Please- don't stop don't change–”

“Oh my god, Jade,” Kit sounds captivated, and maybe a little horrified. “How long has it been?”

Jade just whimpers. She’s embarrassed to hear how desperate she sounds but Kit has her hooked and she really thinks she might scream if the pressure building between her legs doesn’t burst soon.

Kit leans closer, mouthing at her ear as she presses the vibrator a little harder against Jade, the buzz pulsing through her pyjama pants and her underwear. “Please tell me you at least touch yourself over there?” she murmurs into Jade’s ear. “I can't bear to think of you not coming.”

Jade cries out at Kit’s words, but then Kit - the monster - the meanest person in the whole world - pulls the vibrator away and the sound that comes out of Jade’s throat is devastated.

“C’mon Jade, spill - how long’s it been since you last came?”

“I don’t - I don’t know,” Jade pants, head tipped forward. Life in the Wildwood, it was hard, it was busy, she was too tired, her heart hurt too much. “I - sometimes I do - sometimes-” she confesses, because that’s true.

But it’s true, too, that whenever she touched herself it made her miss Kit more than she could bear. Gave her body the release it needed but left her aching for someone to hold. The pleasure was bright and intense but every time it faded and left a deeper loneliness in its place, and the ache clung longer and heavier than the orgasm ever could. Then there were the times - several of them - when she’d tried for relief but had given up in frustration before she could get there, but there was only so much Jade could bring herself to admit to. “Been a while. A while. Now please, Kit!”

Kit relents, and presses the vibrator up against Jade’s cunt again, and Jade’s still begging please when she comes, a minute later, into her pants.

Jade trembles for long moments after she tumbles down onto her back, and Kit settles in beside her. “Do you want to know what that reminded me of?” Kit whispers in her ear, taking the opportunity to nip at her lobe.

Jade’s not sure she can speak yet, but she’ll answer any question Kit asks her right now, so she nods.

“Remember that day in the treehouse?”

Jade moans. She will never, as long as she lives, forget that day in the treehouse. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other, and Kit’s fingers had found a rhythm between Jade’s legs that just kept going, and going, and going. As the crest of each orgasm faded they’d nuzzle and purr and kiss and Kit kept her hand moving, slow, then faster again, over and over.

“‘Just one more,’ you kept saying,” Kit reminds her with a grin as if any of that day had faded from memory. “‘Just one more, just one more.’ I think it was the first time I’d ever heard you ask for more of something.”

Jade can feel herself going red - redder than before, the shame that Kit remembered that aspect of it, that she might think less of Jade for seeing this raw exposed yearning streak in her. She opens her mouth to say something just as Kit puts a finger over her lips.

“I like you greedy like this, you dumbass,” Kit beams at her as she tells her off. “You're so bad at letting yourself want, and it's so fucking hot when you do.”

“Kit, don’t tease.”

“No, I’m gonna,” Kit smiles, and Jade’s breath hitches as Kit rolls head of the vibrator roll over her stomach. “So… this thing has twelve settings. One for each night we’re here. I want to see which setting makes you come the fastest.”

“Kiiiit,” Jade groans as she presses her face into Kit’s chest. Her body is already aching for it, makes her speak without thinking. “Y’know we already missed a night.”

“I knoooow,” Kit kisses her temple, traces her teeth about the shell of Jade’s ear. “And as soon as I can convince you to open your legs again I’m going to try the second.”

Jade only recognises the animal groan that comes out of her throat because she’s heard Kit pull it out of her before, and she rolls onto her back and splits her legs open. “Convinced,” she says, and Kit laughs and reaches for the wand.

The next day passes like a dream. Kit bumps Jade’s hip with her own as they’re washing up after breakfast. Jade hooks her socked foot around Kit’s while they’re ganging up to destroy Elora at the board games they dig out while snow continues to throw itself against the windows. All the while Jade revels in wonder at this feeling in her body like every muscle has realised it’s allowed to relax. She feels like melted butter, she feels like something that’s been slow cooked so long the meat is falling off her bones, delicious and warm and rich. When Kit high fives her to celebrate her (Kit’s) win at the game, Jade high fives her back hard, then keeps hold of her hand under the table. She doesn’t think about letting go, still too wrapped up in how good it felt to collapse into Kit last night after coming, and coming, and coming.

Because they didn’t stop at twice. After Jade’s second orgasm followed so quickly on the heels of her first, Kit kept the vibrator between her legs, a low thrum at the centre of her as they kissed, and kissed, and Jade wriggled out of the last of her clothes and practically purred at the feeling of so much warm, flushed, naked skin pressed against hers, and kissed some more till Kit turned the vibrator onto its third pattern of heavy pulses and short buzzes, turned Jade’s wordless soft moans into a sharp and needy keen.

She’d risen and fallen and risen and fallen till time was meaningless, till everything beyond the confines of their bed was meaningless, and her cunt hummed even when Kit didn’t have the vibrator nestled against her. It hummed as Jade’s fingers found their place sliding inside Kit’s body, throbbing as Kit's muscles clenched around her fingers as she cried out Jade’s name.

Jade’s still thinking about eating Kit out while they graze on lunch. Thinking about the trail of wet kisses she’d left up Kit’s body after, Kit’s own slickness glistening over her belly and breasts and neck in the lamplight. Jade wonders if she looked as wild as she felt after lifting her face from Kit’s cunt, and for a delirious moment she thinks about dragging a mirror into the bedroom tonight so she can burn the image of her own dark hungry eyes and come-messy mouth into her memory forever.

Jade wipes a smear of gravy from the corner of her mouth with a thumb, and catches Kit watching her, Kit’s legs crossed tightly beneath the table.

Jade’s still thinking about different ways she wants to make Kit come when she lays the presents she’s brought under the tree. They’re all little by necessity of having to haul them halfway around the world, and for Kit… there’s two. One under the tree, and one hidden deep in her bag. Jade doesn’t think about the second one, not now, because thinking about it will pull herself out of her body and back into her mind, and Jade’s body refuses to take second place to her mind, today.

Jade’s still thinking about Kit when she steps outside during a break in the weather to chop wood, the rhythm of it bringing to her muscles a satisfying ache, the work of it slicking sweat over her skin. When her heart beats, she still feels the pulse of it between her legs. The heat of the workout and the memories wrap her heart in the warmest layers, and Jade knows that if she did slip her hand into her pants right now, she’d find herself slick and wanting.

She thinks of the way Kit’s legs crossed tight at lunch, and wonders if she’s feeling the same. Jade splits the next log of wood and imagines calling Kit out here without Elora overhearing, thinks about sliding Kit’s hand down into her underwear and murmuring look what you’re doing to me, look what you’re still doing to me.

It’s been so, so, so long since she’s felt like this. Jade chews her Kit-tender lips, and realises she’s going to have to change her underwear before dinner if she doesn’t want to spend the meal thinking about the way wet cotton presses up between her legs. But… maybe she does want that. Maybe she does want to think about Kit and soak all the way through her jeans.

She feels like she’s going a bit crazy. It’s delicious.

Kit had absolutely driven her out of her mind last night, somewhere in the small early hours of the morning when she’d turned her attention away from which setting could make Jade come the fastest, and toward which would take the longest. A familiar diabolical delight had lit up Kit’s eyes as she pushed Jade toward the edge and pulled her back, pushed her to the edge and pulled her back, and for an agonising, aching, impossible amount of time tortured her right on the brink of orgasm. Jade had been reduced to begging and she had no memory now of all the things she said as she pleaded and pleaded in the face of her most merciless of friends to let her come, oh please please let her come.

And Kit had dropped her head and sank her perfect teeth into a clamp around Jade’s nipple and Jade’s whole body had exploded in pleasure so intense she’d had to stuff her mouth with a fistful of duvet to muffle her scream.

She’d never come so hard she’d screamed, before.

She’d never seen Kit look so smug.

Jade had yelped when Kit touched her again, and they’d decided to take a snack break after that, only Jade’s legs wouldn’t work so Kit had gone questing alone. Jade had heard her thumping around in the cupboards as she lay there, her whole body throbbing in time with her cunt, a little terrified because if her counting was right, that had only been setting number nine, and she knew Kit, and she knew herself, and neither of them were going to stop until they’d tried all twelve.

She’d been spot on about that.

Dinner arrives, and Jade lets herself sit in her own mess. It feels illicit, being this wet. A delicious secret she’s going to share with Kit later. Her nipples feel so sensitive they border on painful, and she knows she’s hard under her knitted jumper and that the alpaca is too fuzzy and thick to show it, but beneath the softness her tender, bitten nipple feels like a beacon. It makes her think about the milkmaid and the rancher in that book, how he’d seen the effect he had on her across the milking shed. Jade thinks about taking off her jumper, showing Kit the effect she had on her across the dinner table.

Jade wonders if she’s going to soak into the cushion on her chair before dessert.

She’s barely following the conversation, her body waking in a way she hasn’t let it for far, far too long, so when Elora says, “So, hot tub tonight?” it takes Jade an embarrassing amount of time to come back to herself enough to even say “hmm, what?”

“It’s been heating up all day,” Elora says. “Steaming.”

Jade thinks about Kit in a bathing suit, meets Kit’s eyes, and flushes dark. “Yeah,” she says, and clears her throat to try and shake the husk from her voice, without success. “Oh yeah, absolutely.”

As Jade slips away to get changed, she hears Elora say to Kit, “I told you the weather was going to clear.”

Jade’s swimsuit is balled tightly near the bottom of her bag. In her rush, her hands close around a small embroidered bag and she freezes.

It takes a second, and a few rapid beats of her heart, before she pulls it out into the light. It’s the present she bought for Kit’s birthday, months ago, and then never sent.

It’s just… well… it’s the sort of present that needs to be given in person, that’s why she didn’t post it. It’s also the sort of present that Jade worries might be too much. But there’s still days before Christmas and more than a week after that if she decides it’s not a Christmas present either. She doesn’t have to decide now. She’s got time before she leaves again. It can wait.

Jade shoves it back down into her bag and focuses on binding up her hair.

After a day of sporadic slurries and just a little sleet, the heavy clouds above have finally parted and the moonless sky gleams with a hundred thousand stars. Fairy lights guide the way toward the hot tub that sits halfway between the back door and the trees. By the time Jade steps outside Kit and Elora are already submerged, and Jade hurries across the snowy ground and kicks off her slip on shoes before climbing into the tub.

And there on the edge of it, the sky grabs her fully. At last, there it is in all its glory. Jade stops with one foot in the water and one on the rim. Above her head, the stars go on forever.

She’s missed seeing the constellations this way up. The Wildwood has its own stars, its own stories, its own wonder, but this is the sky Jade’s grown up under. This sky and her love for it are the reason why, when Ballantine had officially adopted her, she’d picked her own middle name when she’d taken his last.

Her eyes are so taken by the stars that she doesn’t notice both Kit and Elora are entirely topless till she actually slips into the water. “Oh,” she says, startled. “Boobs.”

Kit’s mouth splits into a grin. “I don’t believe people with only one hand should be subjugated to bikini tops,” she says, and Elora throws a peace sign and says “solidarity.”

That sounds fair enough to Jade.

Kit’s broken hand is wrapped in a plastic bag, clingfilmed around her forearm and tied with a red bow that’s sagging in the wet. The bow makes her look so dorky, Jade’s sure Elora has something to do with it, and her chest aches all over again with fondness for them both. “The heat isn’t making it hurt, is it?” she asks, worried.

Kit shrugs with her opposite shoulder. “No more than the cold does. And this helps,” she wiggles her champagne glass in her other hand, and tips half the contents back into her mouth.

“Jade,” Elora says, catching her attention as she leans across the water toward her, holding a glass of champagne. The movement raises her breasts higher out of the water and Jade’s eyes are drawn straight to her piercings, two little green christmas tree charms bringing out the rosy pink of her nipples. She really does try not to stare as she accepts the glass.

“Do you like them?” Elora asks, giving her breasts a little jiggle. “I have charms for every season.”

“I have… no doubt,” says Jade, who wouldn’t have predicted it, but now that Elora says it, of course she has seasonable nipple charms.

“She has Loch Ness Monster ones for Halloween,” Kit says, with a little smirk.

“They’re my favourite,” Elora nods. “Drink up! We have a whole bottle keeping cold in the snow but it’s so much better if you don’t let it warm up.”

Jade takes a drink, the ice cold feels as delicious inside as the hot water feels on her outside. The bubbles in her glass glimmer, catching the fairy lights. It's beautiful, and Jade is so in the state of mind where she can sit back and soak in beauty.

“I know it’s a myth, but I still really like the story of Dom Pérignon telling his monk friends ‘I am drinking the stars’.” Jade holds her glass up towards the sky, where the whole milky way is spilled across the night above them. “I mean,” she tips her glass to one side, appreciating it, appreciating the sky. “Look at it.”

“You're such a dork,” Kit says, and Jade lifts her other hand out of the water to flip her off. Kit stretches her legs out under the water and kicks her.

She didn't think she could feel more relaxed, more melted-off-the-bone, but the hot water takes the feeling to another level. Kit, once she’s done trying to kick her, lets her foot linger near Jade’s, and their feet bump together gently as they float in the water. The tub doesn’t light up by itself, and so the steaming water looks black where it isn’t reflecting fairy lights. Jade’s big toe traces over the curve of Kit’s ankle bone as they talk about constellations.

Jade tells them stories of the stars in the Wildwood that they just can't see from here, and the ones that seem to be strange new shapes from this angle of the planet.

“It just makes the whole world feel enormous,” Jade says.

“Nah,” Kit replies. “You literally just said you can see upside down Taramis there. We see a bunch of the same stars, it’s not that far away.”

“Half a world.”

“What does that even mean anymore? People used to travel for months to get across the world. Now we can do it in days. You're a million miles away sure, but so? It's a day and a night. That's not that long. That's not that far. I’d do that in a second if–”

There's something glassy about Kit’s voice, something incongruous with the melted feeling Jade's been basking in all day and when Kit cuts herself off, the broken shards of the sentence pierce into that softness. The force of it digs sharply into Jade’s memory of how Kit was after her father left, and the fervour in her voice when she talked about searching the world for him. It’s the same look, burning dark behind Kit’s blue eyes.

“I could come back with you, you know, when you leave again,” Kit says, and she’s desperately trying to sound mild, sound casual, but her voice shakes with the effort involved and everyone can hear it. Kit herself must hear it, because she does then what she’s always done when she’s exposed her heart too openly; she turns mean. “No college to drop out of to make you feel guilty anymore.”

Elora's gone quiet, the glass to her lips. Jade stammers her way out of silence. “I mean - everything you’ve told me - you’re making a difference, here.”

Kit’s expression changes, less cutting, just as wounded. “I can make a difference wherever I am, Jade.”

Jade knows she’s said the wrong thing, that she’s dropped the ball and isn’t prepared enough to catch it smoothly before it shatters on the ground, but she tries anyway. “Of course you can - I know that. Everything about it - this community you two are building, it’s amazing.”

“I guess,” Kit’s chin is high, and her jaw is tense. “Had to do something, didn’t I, when you left me behind.”

“Oh would you look at that,” Elora says. “Out of bubbles!” And she hauls herself out of the hot tub, grabs the bottle Jade can’t be sure is actually empty, and runs dripping back into the cabin. Jade knows she can’t begrudge her that, but Elora’s always been better at this kind of thing than Jade and she feels a jab of annoyance that Elora isn’t staying here to help.

Which is so stupid. Jade knows that. This is their - her - mess.

She looks back at Kit, who has her arms crossed as tightly as she can manage without dunking her cast in the water. It looks awkward and Jade wants to unravel her, soothe her, wants to swear to Kit she never meant to cause any pain. “You sound so down on yourself, please don’t be down on yourself.”

Jade watches as Kit unclenches her jaw, Kit breathes in fully and lets the breath work on dropping her shoulders. “I’m not,” she says, once she’s reined in the old habit of lashing out. “I love the work I’m doing - that me and Elora are doing. Love the community we’ve built. Wouldn't change it. Cops need punching, mayor needs ousting. But. I miss you. All the time. You’re gone and I think about talking to you every single day and I can’t, so yeah, I made the most of what I had left. And it’s good. And I’m proud of it. But it can be good and that doesn’t stop me wishing we were together but you made other choices, and who would I be if I didn’t want you to be happy? Even if being happy means being on the other side of the world where you have to trek out of the woods to even get close to a phone signal.”

“My family-” Jade begins, and Kit shakes her head hard.

“You don't need to explain it, Jade. I get it. I get why you’re there, I promise. And it’s alright. I don’t-” she takes another breath and Jade can see her talking to herself in her head in ways she never used to, when they were younger, and it hits Jade hard, this wave of love, to see how much she’s grown. “Sorry,” Kit says. “I don’t want to make you feel guilty, honest. A lot of things have changed - and the work I’m doing, that’s important to me, it feels like… what I’m supposed to be doing with my life, you know? But I still mean what I said, last year. I want to be with you. That hasn’t changed, but it’s also pretty obvious that you don’t feel about me the same way I feel about you and that hasn’t changed either so - I make the best of what I’ve got left and I kick ass at it and that can be my life and it’s fine.”

The silence that follows is as loud as the silence when Elora first shut the truck engine off. Jade isn’t even sure if she’s breathing.

It’s the wrong move, again. Kit’s face tenses up and she hauls herself out of the tub. “I think I’m done,” she says, awkwardly wrapping a bathrobe around herself with one arm.

Jade stares at the water, so stunned she’s struggling to think. It’s seconds later when she turns her head to see Elora standing there with her arms crossed. “What on earth was that?”

Jade doesn’t know how to explain that she feels like every star in the sky has crammed into her body and she might be about to nova. Elora peers at her then gets back into the tub before she freezes her christmassy nipples off.

“Start at the beginning,” she says, almost more kindly than Jade can bear. She’s never been comfortable when she notices anyone else needing to be patient with her, but something’s warning her that silence is only going to make the pressure worse.

“Last year,” Jade manages to say. “Kit was talking about coming with me when I left. She said - she wanted to tag along. And I - I couldn’t be this thing that someone else tags themselves on to, what if Kit hated it there? What if she was miserable? And she had college to finish and I just - I couldn’t.”

Elora pulls her mouth over to one side of her face. “Doesn’t sound like that was your decision to make.”

“That’s not what I was-”

“Sounds like that was exactly what you were doing, but you always do that, focus on someone else's problems so you don’t have to figure out your own.” Elora’s looking at her so firmly now, she’s even set her glass down. “Jade,” she says, pointing toward the cabin like she’s casting Jade out of the tub. “Go and talk to her about this, not me, because I'm just going to tell you things that are obvious to anyone but you, things like ‘you’re worthy of someone who wants to build a life around you wherever you are’ and you’re going to get all huffy and weird like you do whenever anyone tries to tell you obvious things about yourself, because you, Jade, might be a pro at working with nature but you’re so terrible at working with your own, and I can’t be having it! You fucked each other stupid last night! Go and talk to her!”

Jade feels like she’s been slapped.

The worst part of it all: Elora’s right.

And Kit, last night, was right: You’re so bad at letting yourself want.

She’s always struggled with that. Jade doesn’t like digging into truths in her own heart, because pulling them up to the light and making other people look at them feels indulgent, and Jade doesn’t do indulgence. But she does realise, as she’s dripping her way across snow in a bathrobe and slip-on shoes, that it’s want that has been one of the things missing from her life this year.

She’s had purpose, planting and planning and healing and bonding with Scorpia, and everything she’s done there feels good, and true. It is terrifying to ask herself how long it’s been since she’d let herself want something for her. Not for anyone else, not for her community, not for the earth itself, but for her own heart. It’s terrifying, because on the heels of that question comes the feeling she’s known longer than almost any other; that wanting more than what she’s got makes her feel ungrateful for everything she does have.

She never wanted to make a fuss, to cause a bother, and the habit has become so deeply ingrained in everything she does - everything she is - she never realised that her fight to stop herself wanting has made Kit feel unwanted.

She is such an idiot!

“Kit!” she calls out, barging through the front door. She checks the living room before she races on, wet footprints dripping on the hardwood floor. “Kit - where are you?”

She finds Kit in the kitchen, pouring herself a dark drink several fingers deep. Jade stops in the doorway, panting.

“What if I do?”

Kit looks at her suspiciously from the other side of the kitchen island. There’s a tell-tale too-brightness to her eyes. “What if you do what?”

“Feel about you the same way you feel about me,” Jade says it, and she can tell her tears are building again with the same potent wave of emotion she felt when she kissed Kit last night.

They fall when Jade says, helplessly: “What if I’m kind of in love with you?”

Kit is just standing there, leaving her drink entirely untouched, looking little, and wet, and cold, and Jade speaks again before Kit can say anything else. “Not ‘kind of’,” she admits, and the nova-pressure feels like it might crack her chest open if she doesn’t say it right. Say it real. “Totally. Ridiculously. Desperately in love with you.”

“Oh,” Kit says softly.

Jade’s exhale is half laugh, half sob, and she mops up her fallen tears with the absorbent sleeve of her robe. “I got you something, for Christmas,” Jade says.

“You better have!” Kit exclaims, and Jade laugh-sobs again, although this one sounds a little more like the laugh might be winning.

“It’s kind of for more than just Christmas… come with?” she asks, and offers her hand to lead Kit through to her bedroom. Kit leaves the glass behind, and takes her hand.

She sits Kit down on the end of the bed and joins her, pulling her bag open. Kit sits with her leg pressed against Jade’s, her eyes going from Jade’s face, to her hands, to her face again.

“I should have given you this earlier,” Jade says, holding the small bag in both of her palms. “Maybe… a lot earlier. I’m sorry that I didn’t, I’m sorry that - it’s not that I don’t want you, I do, I want you, I love you, you’re the best person in my life and I’ve been missing you all year and I didn’t know how to say it without making us both feel bad and I hate making you feel bad but it’s true and - and here,” she makes herself stop talking, pressing the bag into Kit’s hand.

The knot isn’t tight, but Kit undoes it with the help of her teeth anyway. Out of the bag falls a necklace of green stone.

“There’s this river,” Jade says. “It runs through the deepest heart of the Wildwood, and it’s the only place in the world you’ll find that particular shade of green. It means-” Jade has to pause to swipe two more tears from where they’re clinging onto her lashes. “It means home. You give it to someone you want to come home to.”

Kit holds the necklace up to see the way the light plays in the green, but mostly it’s Jade she’s watching. “You want to come home to me?”

Jade nods, unable to form words, and the movement shakes more tears from her eyes.

“I want you to,” Kit says. “Or I want to come to you or - either way, yes. Yes. Please.”

“It’s just that-”

“Oh shut up, I know,” Kit says, and the sharp broken edges of her voice have disappeared, although a little of the bruise remains. “I want to - but I can’t abandon Elora right now, and Willow and Mims and everyone the Harbinger is fucking over. It’s just - a bad time.”

“I know, I know, they need you.”

“And your sister - and the whole place over there needs you.”

“Right now, yeah, they do.”

“But we’ll figure out a way, right?” Kit swings the necklace between them, bumps it against Jade’s chest. “And one day you’ll come home to me or I’ll come home to you.”

“One of those,” Jade promises. “Definitely one of those.”

“And when we do… do you want to be together? Really and truly together?”

“We can already be together.” Jade reaches out and catches her hand to stop the pendant swinging. “Being on the other side of the world doesn’t mean we can’t be together.”

“Makes it harder to kiss you.”

Jade fingers the necklace, leans forward to kiss Kit softly. “Doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

“Me either,” Kit rests her forehead on Jade’s, her eyes closed. “Don’t think there’s anything in the world that’ll make me love you any less.”

For once, Jade doesn’t try to grab onto this moment and force it into a memory - she lets it be. She will remember it, but not because she’s frantic to bottle up another disjointed piece of happiness so she can cling to the memory of it when her heart is hurting. She will remember it because she can feel the moment setting down roots inside of her, strong and deep and true.

She and Kit have been friends since they were children, lovers since they were teens, and as of tonight, they’re partners. Jade kisses Kit one more time, and thinks that maybe she can really believe in it now; partners and lovers and friends, the three-part recipe of life to make sure the world doesn’t break them.