[for rosie]

[daughterofawolf]

[dated sometime between Valentine's and today, we'll play it by ear!]

It's a Saturday, which generally means work, but she's the close shift today. When Eponine wakes up while it's still morning enough to feel early, it doesn't mean groaning and rushing. She wakes up feeling rested after a dream that she can't remember but that she seems to remember being pleasant, and debates staying in bed just because she can, and then gets herself up and dressed because that rarely works.

Today what it means is that she looks around her apartment, and thinks, I have so much to pack up, and not much at all, too with some bemusement and then, delightedly, Soon I'll be living with Ellie all the time! and subsequently, Dieu au paradis, what if this is a complete disaster.

She sits down on the floor of her living room. Ellie is not the one to talk to about this: for one, she's not an unbiased party, but also Eponine doesn't want to scare her into actually taking the invitation back. For she really is excited about it, so much she could burst, really, or she wouldn't be nervous.

This requires a specific sort of friend. Someone she can trust not to laugh at her for being excited or for being nervous, and someone who knows her and the sorts of reasons she has to doubt herself, and someone who won't find girl talk too frivolous -- which should by rights exclude her from the conversation. She'd never imagined she'd need or have the chance to fret over the landmarks of a relationship, and this one had started so slowly and escalated so obliquely that she'd not had to fret much over it, or rather, the major moments had been figured out on the go.

But this is a proper, silly-but-completely-serious, fret, and there's only one person for it.

Are you doing anything today, and if not, ☕️☕️? she texts Rosie.
I will admit that this is not an ENTIRELY selfish question she adds a few moments later in the interest of honesty, for I need some advice. But I'd like to see you, too. xx

Comments

[forthsofar]

"Yes," says Rosie. Something about it, about the simplicity of the answer or the gentle way Eponine asked the question, the immediacy of her response, feels like letting go of something. It's hard to tell, in the moment, whether it's a relief or not.

"It isn't as if I had lots of boyfriends before, just Nick, since we both know what David thought of our time together." She pulls a face, a quick flash of exaggerated disgust. "And I've certainly thought girls are pretty, and you and I had our whole..." With a faint, lopsided smile, she gestures vaguely at the space between them. Whatever they'd had, it had been too uncertain to define, lost and grown out of before either of them had known what to do with it. "But boyfriends are the only things I've had, and..."

Trailing off again, she looks down at the table, away from Eponine's patient and waiting expression. "I don't know if it makes a liar of me then, or a liar of me now, but either way I haven't been honest with someone."

[daughterofawolf]

Eponine winces, nodding in understanding. She wishes, just then, that they weren't in such oversized chairs, that they'd chosen a seat with a sofa instead, so she could lean into Rosie in support. It'd been hard for her to wrap her own head around, and yet she thinks it might have been easier for her than it is for Rosie. Back home, she'd already been used to being not a proper sort in so many ways. And it was all less of an identity, too, the way it's seen here. Rosie's from an older time too, but one where loving another woman is, as she understands it, both outside the norm and a little more definitive.

She smiles a little at Rosie's little gesture, even as she makes a similar face about David. Eponine frowns, though, as she goes on.

"Rosie," she says, and then she really does put her tea down and reach across the table to catch Rosie's hands in hers and squeeze them. "Dieu. You're not a liar for not knowing something."

"For one thing," she says, practically, drawing her hands back a little so she's not foisting touch on Rosie if she might not want it, "You can have both, you know. I mean -- not have, though I suppose you can, at that. But love both women and men, and you don't have to always have known or have dated everyone you've ever thought was pretty. I loved Marius, as much as I could love anyone then, but I'd never dated anyone at all until Ellie."

Slept with isn't the same as dating. There's a lot she has misgivings about, but between her friends and her therapist, she's been assured that quite a lot of things get to not count in her life.

"And if you do end up preferring one or the other, what happened in the past -- whether it was with Nick or David, or Sabrina -- that's not a lie. You're not tricking someone."

She takes a sip of her tea. "What matters is what makes you feel happy, no matter what anyone thinks or how long it takes you to figure out. You get to have that."

[forthsofar]

She laughs a little, the sound strained, when Eponine's fingers thread with hers. She returns the squeeze, taking reassurance from it--even when everything Eponine actually says sounds almost too simple to be believable. Not a lie, any of it, just far too neat.

"Feels like I should have known before now," she murmurs, letting Eponine pull back again and picking up her drink. She takes a sip, fingers wrapping around the cup. "But I'm...I am happy with her. Being with her, all the ways that's changed with Nick being gone. I love that."