It was Emmy who suggested the wine.
This was not surprising. Emmy had been suggesting the wine, in various implicit ways, since approximately four-thirty, when they'd returned from Walmart and the afternoon had settled into the particular quality of a Saturday evening that had nowhere specific to be. She had circled the wardrobe twice. She had opened it, looked at something near the back, and closed it again with the expression of someone exercising restraint on principle.
Juliet had watched all of this from her chair and said nothing, because she had known about the wine for two years and had a policy about not mentioning things Emmy wasn't ready to mention yet.
At seven o'clock, Emmy opened the wardrobe a third time and retrieved a bottle of red from behind her winter boots with the decisive energy of someone who had finished exercising restraint.
"Occasion," she said, by way of explanation.
"That qualifies," Juliet agreed, with the look of a woman who might not have much fight left in her for matters of propriety.
They didn't have wine glasses — this was a dorm room, not a vineyard — so Emmy used the two coffee mugs that had been on the desk since morning, rinsed briefly in the bathroom and returned with the pragmatic efficiency she applied to most logistical problems. She poured. She handed Juliet's mug across. She tucked herself into the windowsill with her own — feet under her, teal throw around her shoulders, the dark September sky behind the glass doing its patient work.
"To impossible Fridays," Emmy said.
Juliet looked at her mug. At Emmy. At the fairy lights doing their amber work above the bed. "To impossible Fridays," she said.
The wine was good — better than it had any right to be, given that it had been living behind winter boots for an unspecified number of weeks. Emmy had chosen it well. She always chose things well, quietly and without announcing the care she'd put into it, which was one of the things about Emmy that Juliet filed under the heading she was not going to look at tonight. After all, Emmy had also chosen Juliet, in a manner of speaking.
They sat in their respective spots and the room was warm and the fairy lights were doing what fairy lights did and the evening had that quality again — the snow globe quality, the whole outside world at bay — that Juliet had felt just under a day ago, which felt, now, like something from another life.
"Okay," Emmy said, after a comfortable silence that had gone on long enough to become something else. "I have a proposal."
"You have a proposal," Juliet repeated.
"I do." Emmy's expression was the one that meant she had already decided something and was now presenting it as a collaborative discussion. "Truth or dare."
Juliet looked at her.
"I know," Emmy said, preemptively. "But consider: we have been having a significant number of significant conversations today and I think the structure might be useful."
"The structure."
"Of the game. It gives us — permission. To ask things we might not otherwise ask." She held Juliet's gaze with the directness she deployed when she meant something. "You don't have to answer anything you don't want to answer. Same for me."
Juliet thought about this. She thought about the almost-words that had been gathering and dissolving for five years. She thought about I didn't mind and the couple word in the Walmart t-shirt section that neither of them had looked at directly. She thought about Emmy's hands in her hair and not even a little bit bad and the way the morning light had sat in Emmy's hair the same way the evening light did and Emmy apparently being impervious to unflattering light across the entire spectrum.
"Okay," she said.
Emmy's expression did the thing it did when she was pleased and trying not to show it. "Truth or dare?"
"Truth," Juliet said. "To start."
Emmy's first question was easy. What's the first thing you remember thinking when you looked in the mirror?
Juliet considered for a moment. "Oh," she said. "Just — oh. Before anything else. Before the panic and the fainting and all of it. Just — oh. Like recognizing something."
Emmy looked at her for a moment with the expression that moved through her face like weather. Then she nodded. Filed it. "Truth or dare?"
"Truth again."
"What does it feel like? Right now, in this room, on this specific Saturday. Not philosophically. Just — what does it feel like."
Juliet looked at the wine in her mug. At the fairy lights. At Emmy on the windowsill with her feet tucked under her and the teal throw and the way her hair was doing what it always did.
"Like being exactly where I'm supposed to be," she said, "in a way I've never felt anywhere before." She paused. "That's probably the wine."
"Probably," Emmy agreed, in a tone that made it clear she didn't think it was the wine. "Truth or dare?"
"Truth. Your turn."
Emmy tilted her head. "You get to ask me?"
"I believe that's how the game works."
"Fair." She settled back against the window frame. "Go ahead."
Juliet looked at her. She had been not-asking this question for five years. She had been not-asking it in approximately thirty different ways, each time finding a reason not to, each time constructing a careful architecture around the not-asking. The wine, she thought, was doing something to the architecture.
"What did you feel," she said, carefully, "when you saw me in the bathroom doorway. The actual first thing. Before the laughing."
Emmy was quiet for a moment.
"Certain," she said.
"Certain."
"That it was you." She held Juliet's gaze. "I walked through that door and there was a person I'd never seen before and my first thought — before confusion, before anything — was that's Julian. Without any reason to think so. Just — certain." A pause. "I don't know what that means. I think it means something."
Juliet looked at her for a long moment. "Truth or dare?"
"Truth."
"How long," Juliet said, with the care of someone disarming something, "have you known that you — " She stopped. Found the end of it. "That I'm not just a friend to you."
The room was very still.
Emmy looked at her with the unguarded expression — the one she didn't usually let sit still long enough to read — and it sat still now, for long enough. "A while," she said finally. "I don't know exactly when. I know I kept not — categorizing it properly. I know I tried." She paused. "I know that when I asked you tonight and you said yes I was relieved in a specific way. Does that answer it?"
"Yes," Juliet said. "That answers it."
"Truth or dare?"
Juliet looked at her across the small warm room. At the fairy lights. At Emmy's face in the amber light. At the question she'd been not-asking herself in approximately the same number of ways as the one she'd just asked Emmy.
"Dare," she said.
Emmy looked at her.
Something moved through the room — not quite silence, not quite sound, the particular quality of a moment that knows it's a moment.
"Okay," Emmy said. Her voice was steady in the way of someone who has made a decision and is not going back on it. She set her mug down on the windowsill. "I dare you to close the distance."
Juliet set her mug on the desk. Carefully.
She stood up. Oddly sure in her body, despite the small buzz and new proportions.
She crossed the six feet of the room — this room, this warm small amber room that she had crossed approximately ten thousand times in five years, that she could have crossed in the dark, that she knew the way she knew the route from the Hartwell house to Pemberton Hall — except that she had never crossed it quite like this before. With the wine and the truth questions and Emmy watching her from the windowsill with her feet tucked under her and the particular expression she'd been wearing since I dare you to close the distance.
She stopped in front of the windowsill.
Emmy looked up at her. The dark September sky was behind her through the glass, the fairy lights were doing their amber work, and Emmy's face was exactly as familiar as it had always been and also, in this moment, entirely new.
"Hi," Emmy said softly.
"Hi," Juliet said.
She sat down on the windowsill — on the right side, her side, the side that had always been hers — and turned to face Emmy, who had not moved, who was watching her with the focused attention she gave to things that mattered, which was different from the focused attention she gave to things she was trying to understand.
She reached out.
Slowly. With the deliberateness of someone who has decided something and wants to decide it properly. She put her hand against Emmy's cheek — warm, slightly flushed, the faint scent of the wine they'd been drinking — and Emmy's eyes closed for just a moment, and then opened again, and then they were looking at each other from approximately six inches apart and the room was very quiet.
"Jules," Emmy said. Barely above a whisper.
"Yeah," Juliet said.
And then Juliet leaned forward and closed the last distance, and for the first time in eighteen years the almost-words found somewhere to go.
It was not the first kiss Juliet had imagined, on the few occasions she had allowed herself to imagine it. It was better than that, in the way that real things are better than imagined things — more awkward at first, her nose bumping slightly against Emmy's before they both adjusted, Emmy's breath catching in a way that Juliet felt more than heard. Emmy's hand found her shoulder and then her jaw and then she was being kissed back with a warmth and a certainty that made the last five years reorganize themselves quietly in the back of Juliet's mind into something that made more sense than they had before.
She had always known this was where they were going.
She just hadn't known she was allowed to go there.
She pulled back first — not far, an inch, two — and they looked at each other in the amber light.
Emmy's expression was the one she didn't guard. The one that moved through her face and usually kept moving. It was staying still now, and Juliet looked at it and felt the particular vertigo of seeing something you've been looking at sideways for years, finally head-on.
"Okay," Emmy said, barely audible.
"Okay," Juliet said.
Emmy's thumb moved, once, against her jaw — the smallest possible gesture, entirely unthinking — and Juliet's whole nervous system registered it with the thoroughness of someone who had been waiting for it for a very long time without knowing they were waiting.
She was going to say something. She was not sure what. She was going to say something and it was going to be — possibly — true and important and five years overdue and she was opening her mouth to find out what it was when Emmy's phone lit up on the nightstand.
They both looked at it.
rob: hey em you around? want to come by and see your new roommate hahaha
The room reassembled itself around the text with an almost audible click. Emmy stared at the phone. Then at Juliet. Then back at the phone. The expression on her face went through several stages in rapid succession.
"He's downstairs," Emmy said.
"He's downstairs," Juliet confirmed.
"He cannot—" Emmy picked up the phone with the energy of someone taking decisive action. "He absolutely cannot come up here right now. Give me—" She was already typing. Juliet watched her compose what was, from the speed of it, a masterpiece of sisterly discouragement.
em: bad timing!! studying, catch you tomorrow? brunch?
The reply was immediate.
rob: ok but I want to meet her properly
em: tomorrow I promise
rob: fine but you better not be hiding anything
Emmy set the phone down. She looked at Juliet. Juliet looked at her. The moment — the one with the almost-words and the thumb against the jaw and the kiss that had rearranged five years into something that made sense — was not gone exactly, but it had shifted. It had become something quieter and more interior, the way things do when the outside world interrupts.
"Sorry," Emmy said.
"Don't be." Juliet meant it. The interruption had, if anything, given her time to feel the full shape of what had just happened — the kiss, and the want-to-say-something that had been right there, and the five years that were now organized differently. She needed a moment with all of that. "Tomorrow," she said. "Rob."
"Tomorrow," Emmy agreed. She looked at Juliet with the expression that was staying still again — not all the way unguarded, but more than usual. "Jules."
"Yeah."
"That was—" She stopped. Tried again. "I've wanted—" She stopped again.
"I know," Juliet said. Because she did. Because it was mutual, and it had been mutual for a very long time, and they both knew it now, and the knowing was large enough that it didn't need to be said all at once.
Emmy nodded. Slowly. "Okay," she said.
"Okay," Juliet agreed.
They slept.
Not immediately — there was the business of washing up and changing, of Juliet in the new Walmart things and Emmy in the t-shirt she slept in, of the fairy lights turned down but not off, which was how Emmy always had them, a very low amber against the dark. They lay in the twin extra-long that was cozy in the way that was a diplomatic description, and Emmy's ice-cold feet found Juliet's calves with the reliability of physics, and Juliet did not move away from them.
The room was quiet. The campus was quiet. Outside the west window, the September night had settled into the specific stillness of very late Saturday, and in here everything was warm and amber and still.
Juliet lay awake.
This was not unusual — she was a person who had always lain awake after significant events, processing them in the dark with the methodical patience she brought to philosophy papers and difficult problems. This was a significant event. The most significant, probably, in a day that had contained several of them.
She thought about the kiss.
She thought about the way Emmy had kissed her back — the warmth of it, the certainty, the hand against her jaw. She thought about I've wanted— left unfinished, and understood that the unfinished was not uncertainty. It was too large to finish in one sentence. Some things needed more than one night.
She thought, quietly and without the guilt that had always accompanied it before, about her mother.
She thought: your left ankle is wobbling. Keep your weight over the ball of your foot.
She thought: she knew.
Beside her, Emmy was also awake.
This was not unusual for Emmy either, though it usually manifested as restless rather than still — her brain running its own course regardless of what the rest of her wanted. Tonight it was still. She lay on her side, facing the dark room, aware of Juliet's warmth beside her and the amber of the fairy lights and the September night outside and the fact that something had changed.
Not in the way of changed and couldn't change back. In the way of — clarified. The way a word looked different once you understood what it meant. She had understood what she meant for a while, she thought. She had just been very committed to not looking at it directly.
I dare you to close the distance.
She had not said that to be clever. She had not said it as a game. She had said it because it was the truest thing she had available to her in that moment, and Emmy, when she got out of her own way, had a talent for saying the truest available thing.
She had not expected the almost-words to be so close to the surface. She had not expected to have to stop herself from saying them, from saying everything, right there in the amber light with Juliet's hand against her cheek.
Gemstone, she thought, without quite deciding to think it. My gemstone.
She did not know why that word arrived. She did not examine it. She filed it under things that would make sense later, which was a heading she had borrowed from Julian without his knowledge and found very useful.
Outside the window, Crestfield continued its late Saturday. The fairy lights held their amber against the dark. The chip bag sat on the desk in its permanent archaeological retirement. The succulent persisted.
Emmy closed her eyes. She was, she thought, being exactly calm enough.