Candles in the Window
The first snow came in sideways. Nicole had been saying something about the downstairs neighbors and their habit of running laundry at midnight, and then the lights just. Went.
The fridge stopped humming. The heater cut out. Even the little standby light on the TV blinked off.
The apartment went quiet in a way that felt personal.
Nicole stood there mid-sentence with her mouth open.
"Oh my god." She looked at the ceiling like it owed her an explanation. "Of course."
Jecka was already checking her phone. No service. No estimates. The utility app just spun.
"How long?" Nicole asked.
"Doesn't say."
"What do you mean it doesn't say."
"It means it doesn't say, Nicole."
Nicole turned toward the window. Outside, the street was already going gray under the snow. Streetlights looked like smudges. The world had that muffled, heavy quality that meant it had been snowing for longer than they'd noticed.
She started pacing.
"We're going to freeze." She picked up a throw blanket off the armchair and looked at it like it was inadequate. "This is literally how people die. You read about this. People stay in their apartment, too stubborn to leave, found in spring."
"We're not going to die."
"You don't know that."
"We have blankets, a gas stove, and four walls." Jecka set her phone down. "We're fine."
"I look terrible in candlelight by the way. Just so you know. In case anyone was thinking about lighting candles." She threw the blanket back down. "My undertone does not cooperate."
Jecka laughed.
Not big. Not at her. Just soft, like something came loose.
Nicole stopped pacing.
She didn't say anything about that. But her shoulders dropped about an inch and she stopped looking at the ceiling.
"Okay," she said, like she was conceding something she hadn't been asked. "Fine. What's the plan."
Jecka was already moving before Nicole finished the sentence.
"Candles," she said, from somewhere down the hall.
Nicole stayed where she was. "That's it? That's the whole plan?"
"That's step one."
"What's step two."
Jecka reappeared in the doorway with a canvas bag Nicole had genuinely never seen before.
She set it on the coffee table and started pulling things out.
A tall white pillar. A squat amber jar with the lid half melted on. The vanilla one Nicole had complained about three weeks ago. The one shaped like a pinecone that was definitely never meant to be burned. A taper candle with no holder that Jecka propped in a glass of rice like she'd done it before.
"How many candles do you own," Nicole said.
"Enough."
"That's not a number."
"I know."
She kept pulling them out. A lavender one. A short green one that smelled like a forest floor. The old bookstore one. Nicole recognized that one. She'd said it smelled dusty in a good way and then immediately acted like she hadn't.
Jecka lit them one by one with a long match, moving through the room with this quiet focus that Nicole didn't know what to do with.
The apartment changed.
Not dramatically. Not like a movie. Just the shadows softened and the gold started collecting in the corners and the snow outside the window turned blue against all that warm inside light.
Jecka crouched by the coffee table to adjust the pillar candle and the light caught the side of her face. The angle of her jaw. The way she was concentrating.
Nicole looked away.
She looked at the window. Very deliberately at the window.
"Stop making it romantic."
Jecka didn't look up. "I'm literally just lighting candles."
"Exactly."
A pause.
"What does that mean," Jecka said.
"It means exactly what it sounds like." Nicole sat down on the couch with her arms crossed. She was looking at the window still. "You're doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where you make a power outage into a whole ambiance situation." She gestured vaguely at the room. "All of this. It's a thing."
Jecka sat back on her heels and looked around at her own handiwork. Like she was genuinely considering it.
"It's just candles," she said finally.
"Right," Nicole said. "That's what I said."
Jecka looked at her then.
Nicole was very committed to the window.
The bookstore candle was the closest one to her. She could smell it from here. She did not comment on this.
Outside, the snow had gotten serious. It came down in thick slow curtains now, the kind that swallowed sound. The streetlights had given up being useful.
The apartment was warm enough still but Nicole could feel the edges of that changing.
"We should stay in one room," Jecka said. "Conserve heat."
Nicole gave her a look. "We're not pioneers."
"No, we have a gas stove and insulated windows. We're way better off than pioneers." Jecka was already moving toward the hallway. "Grab the couch throw."
"I'm not doing this."
She did it.
They made three trips. The couch throw, then the big comforter off Nicole's bed, then Jecka came back with her own blanket and the two decorative pillows from the armchair Nicole kept meaning to donate but hadn't. Nicole grabbed her hoodie off the bathroom door because she was passing it anyway, not because she was cold.
The living room started looking like a very deliberate disaster.
They were arranging the comforter on the floor when Nicole got the corner caught under her foot and went sideways. Not a fall exactly. More of a committed stumble.
Jecka caught her.
Both hands at her waist, automatic, no hesitation. The way you catch something without deciding to.
Nicole grabbed Jecka's arm to steady herself and for a second they were just. Standing there. Closer than they'd been planning on.
Jecka's hands didn't move.
Nicole didn't say anything.
The bookstore candle was doing something unnecessary in her peripheral vision.
Then Jecka let go and crouched back down to fix the corner of the comforter like it was a structural priority.
"The floor's uneven," she said.
"It's really not," Nicole said.
"Little bit."
"It's a flat floor, Jecka."
Neither of them was talking about the floor.
They finished the nest in silence. It came out good actually, not that Nicole said that. Comforter down first, hoodie pile for pillows, the throw blanket folded over the top for when it got colder later. Jecka put two candles on the coffee table within reach.
Nicole sat down on the far edge.
Like. The furthest reasonable point. With her back against the couch.
She pulled the throw blanket over her legs and picked up her phone, which had no service, and looked at it anyway.
Jecka settled on her side of the nest. Nicole was aware of exactly how much space was between them. She didn't measure it. She just knew.
Two minutes, maybe less.
The draft from the window hit her ankles and she shifted without thinking and then she was six inches closer than she'd started and she told herself it was a reasonable adjustment given the cold situation and the fact that the floor was harder than it looked.
Jecka didn't say anything.
Nicole looked at her phone some more.
Warm Enough
The wind picked up around nine.
Nicole could hear it finding the gaps in the window frame, that thin whistle that meant the temperature had dropped for real. She pulled the throw blanket tighter and stared at the candle on the coffee table like it had said something interesting.
Her teeth chattered. Once, just one time, before she could stop it.
She covered it with a cough.
Jecka didn't say anything. Didn't look at her with that face. Didn't make it a thing.
She just shifted and opened her arm.
Not a big gesture. Not a production. Just. Space, offered. Room, made.
Nicole's brain did something unhelpful.
She looked at the candle. She looked at the window. She thought about saying something deflecting and sarcastic and she could already hear how it would come out and it would work, it would land, and then she'd still be cold on the far edge of the blanket nest listening to the wind.
She slid closer.
Casually. Like it was a practical decision she'd made after weighing several options.
Their thighs pressed together and Nicole felt it everywhere, which was insane, which was a completely disproportionate response to basic physical contact, which she was not going to think about.
She stared at the candle.
Breathed in.
The bookstore smell was still there. Jecka was warm through her sleeve. The wind hit the window and Nicole didn't move away from it and didn't move toward it and just. Sat there.
Tried to breathe normally.
The trying was loud, internally. She hoped it wasn't loud externally.
"Better?" Jecka asked.
"I wasn't cold," Nicole said.
"Okay."
"I'm just sitting here."
"I know."
She did not move away.
The candles burned down a little. Neither of them moved to replace them. Nicole's phone had given up pretending it might get service and she'd put it face down somewhere in the blanket pile.
It got quieter. The specific quiet of a city under snow, all that sound absorbed, the world gone soft and muffled and far away.
Jecka lay back first.
Nicole followed, eventually, in a way that could have been interpreted as coincidental.
The ceiling was doing nothing interesting but they both looked at it anyway. The candles threw soft shapes up there, slow moving, almost like water. Outside the snow had gone quiet. Just the occasional gust and then nothing again.
"Worst outfit you've ever worn," Jecka said.
"Define worn. Like voluntarily or-"
"Either."
"Seventh grade. Butterfly clips and a skirt that was genuinely too many colors. It was a whole situation." She paused. "You?"
"I had a phase where I only wore cargo pants."
"That's not a phase that's a personality."
"It was a phase."
"How many pockets."
"Too many," Jecka said. "That was the problem."
Nicole laughed. Actually laughed, not the performative version.
"First celebrity crush," Jecka said.
"I'm not answering that."
"Why not."
"Because it's embarrassing and this is a judgment-free zone only when it's convenient for me." Nicole turned her head slightly. "You first."
Jecka didn't even hesitate. Just said a name, completely sincere, zero shame.
Nicole stared at the ceiling. "Okay I respect that actually."
"Your turn."
Nicole told her. It came out easier than expected. Jecka made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh, warm and surprised, and Nicole felt it more than she heard it.
"If you could relive one day," Jecka said. Her voice had shifted slightly. Still easy, but quieter.
"Any day?"
"Any day."
"I don't know. Something normal. Like a day where nothing happened and I didn't know at the time that it was good." She paused. "That's a weird answer."
"It's not."
"What about you."
"Last summer. That week in July where it didn't rain and we got food from that truck every night." A beat. "Nothing happened. It was just good."
Nicole didn't say anything.
She knew that week. She'd been there for it.
The ceiling moved softly in the candlelight. Their shoulders were touching and had been for a while. Jecka's voice in the dark had a particular quality, lower than usual, unhurried. Nicole had heard it before obviously. She knew Jecka's voice.
But she was suddenly aware of knowing it. The specific weight of it. The way it sounded when Jecka wasn't performing anything for anyone.
She kept that thought to herself.
Looked at the ceiling.
Let it sit there anyway.
The candle nearest to them guttered once, caught, steadied.
Nicole shifted her jaw. Looked at nothing in particular.
"What's your worst fear?"
Nicole felt the question land.
She let a beat go by. Two. "Running out of snacks during a power outage."
"Nicole."
"What. That's a real fear. I'm experiencing it right now."
"You have half a bag of pretzels and emergency granola bars."
"Emergency granola bars are not snacks, they're a last resort." Nicole pulled the blanket up slightly. "They taste like compressed sadness."
Jecka let it go.
She didn't push. She never pushed. She just let the silence settle back in, easy, like she had all night, like she wasn't bothered by the deflection at all.
That was somehow worse.
Nicole looked at the ceiling. The candle shapes moved slow.
"What would you do," she said. She meant it to come out casual. It didn't. "If I. Left."
The word sat there wrong.
She hadn't meant to say it like that. With that particular weight. She'd been going for something lighter, something that could pass as hypothetical, a normal 20 questions kind of question, and instead it came out like something she'd been holding.
Jecka didn't laugh.
Didn't make it weird. Didn't pause too long.
"I'd follow you."
Simple. No buildup. Like it was obvious.
Nicole's chest did something inconvenient.
She kept her eyes on the ceiling. The candle threw a slow shape across the plaster and she watched it move and didn't say anything and tried to locate a normal response somewhere in her body and found nothing useful.
"That's," she started.
Stopped.
"Okay," she said.
Which meant nothing. Which was all she had.
The wind outside had settled into something steadier. Consistent. Like it had decided on a direction and committed.
Nicole looked at the ceiling.
Jecka looked at the ceiling.
The bookstore candle was almost down to the glass.
Her heart is loud.
11:16 PM
Nicole laughed.
It came out a little too quick, a little too bright. "You're so dramatic."
Jecka turned her head.
Nicole could feel it without looking. The specific quality of being looked at in the dark.
"I'm serious," Jecka said.
Not defensive. Not performing sincerity. Just. Serious.
Nicole didn't have anything for that. She kept her eyes up. The ceiling was very interesting. The candle shapes were doing their slow thing and she tracked one all the way across the plaster and it didn't help.
The wind hit the window hard enough to rattle the frame. Nicole felt Jecka shift slightly beside her, not away, just a small adjustment.
Then, quieter.
"You're my person, you know that, right?"
Not a question exactly. Or it was but it wasn't asking for confirmation. It was saying something and wrapping it in a question shape because that was easier. Nicole understood that impulse.
She understood it because she did it constantly.
Her throat felt tight.
Not romantic. Jecka hadn't said anything romantic. It wasn't labeled. It wasn't a declaration. It was just the truest possible version of something and it landed anyway, landed hard, right in the center of Nicole's chest where she kept the things she didn't look at directly.
She swallowed.
Her heart was embarrassingly loud. She was certain Jecka couldn't actually hear it but her body hadn't gotten that memo.
She didn't laugh this time.
She didn't deflect.
She just lay there in the candlelight with the wind at the window and let it be true.
Morning, Together
At some point they'd turned toward each other.
Nicole wasn't sure when. It had happened the way everything tonight had happened, incrementally, deniably, one small adjustment at a time until suddenly the situation was undeniable.
They were facing each other now. Close enough that Nicole could see the candlelight moving in Jecka's eyes. Close enough that this was a different category of close than before.
The candle on the table flickered. Shadows shifted.
Jecka reached over and brushed Nicole's hair back from her face.
Gentle. Absent, almost, like she'd done it without deciding to. Her fingers just. Moved. Tucked the hair back behind Nicole's ear and stayed there a half second too long, warm against her temple.
Nicole stopped breathing.
Jecka's expression changed. The moment she registered what she was doing, where her hand was, how close they were. Something flickered across her face and her hand started to pull back.
Nicole grabbed her wrist.
Not hard. Just her fingers closing around it. Just enough to stop the movement.
Jecka went still.
The candle threw gold across the side of her face.
"Don't," Nicole said.
It came out quieter than she meant. Or exactly as quiet as she meant. She wasn't sure.
Silence.
Just their breathing and the snow ticking against the glass and the candle doing its slow thing and Nicole's hand around Jecka's wrist and all that space between them that wasn't very much space.
Nicole's heart was still loud.
She thought: if I don't say something now I never will.
She thought: I have been not saying this for a very long time.
She thought: okay.
The snow against the glass.
Jecka waiting.
Nicole opened her mouth.
It didn't come out elegant.
"I don't want you to follow me."
Jecka blinked. Her wrist still in Nicole's hand.
Nicole pushed through before she could stop herself. Before the part of her brain that managed these things could slam the door back shut.
"I don't want to leave in the first place."
Something shifted in Jecka's face. Not surprise exactly. More like something that had been held carefully for a long time was being set down.
Nicole's voice was doing something embarrassing. She kept going anyway.
"I think I've been." She stopped. Started again. "I've been pretending this isn't what it is. For a while. Kind of a long time actually."
Jecka was very still.
"What is it," she said. Soft. Not a challenge. Just asking. Just giving Nicole the space to say it out loud.
Nicole closed her eyes.
The snow against the glass. The candle warm through her eyelids. Jecka's pulse under her fingers, steady, present.
"Us," she said.
Not loud. Not the way it sounded in her head when she'd imagined saying something like this, which she hadn't, which she definitely hadn't done. Not dramatic. Not a revelation.
Just true.
Just the truest thing she'd said all night and maybe in longer than that.
She kept her eyes closed for one more second.
Then opened them.
Jecka was looking at her like she was something worth looking at.
Nicole didn't look away.
Jecka's hand was still close. The candle between them burned down to almost nothing, the light gone small and steady.
Neither of them moved.
Then Jecka didn't hesitate.
She leaned in slow. Slow enough to stop, slow enough for Nicole to turn it into something else if she needed to, slow enough that it was a question with time to answer.
Nicole met her halfway.
It was soft. Careful. Warm in a way that had nothing to do with the blankets or the candles or the cold outside.
It wasn't fireworks. It wasn't the way Nicole had vaguely, hypothetically, definitely not imagined it. It was quieter than that.
It was relief.
The specific feeling of something that had been braced finally letting go.
They pulled back. Just enough to breathe. Foreheads almost touching, the cold air between them thin and close.
Nicole laughed.
It came out shaky, a little wrecked, completely involuntary. "This is so inconvenient."
Jecka smiled. Nicole could feel it, that close. "Shut up."
"I'm just saying. Timing wise this is genuinely-"
Jecka kissed her again.
Longer this time. Nicole's hand still at her wrist, then not, then her fingers finding Jecka's instead, and the candle burned low on the table and the snow kept doing its thing against the glass and none of that was the part that mattered.
The part that mattered was this.
Nicole stopped talking.
For once.
The candle on the table burned itself out sometime after that. The room went darker, just snowlight through the glass, blue and soft and enough.
They stayed where they were.
Nicole woke up first.
The room was bright in that specific winter way, all that snow outside throwing light back at itself. The candles had burned out sometime in the night. The power was still off. She could tell by the silence, that particular absence of hum.
Jecka's arm was around her waist.
Face tucked into Nicole's shoulder, breath warm and even. Hair messy against Nicole's collarbone. Heavy and present and real.
Nicole looked at the ceiling.
She waited for the panic. The part where her brain woke up before the rest of her and started its thing, cataloguing, building cases, finding all the reasons last night was a mistake she'd have to carefully dismantle.
It didn't come.
Just the snow outside throwing light across the ceiling. Just Jecka's arm around her waist and her breath warm and even against Nicole's shoulder and the blanket nest they'd built on the living room floor like two people with no dignity and no regrets.
She just lay there. In the blanket nest on the living room floor with the snow bright outside and Jecka breathing slow against her shoulder and nothing to do about any of it except be in it.
Nicole looked at the top of Jecka's head.
She pressed a kiss into her hair. Didn't decide to. Just did.
Jecka stirred. Slow, small. Smiled without opening her eyes, Nicole could feel it against her collarbone.
Nicole opened her mouth.
Closed it.
Tried again.
"I love you," she said. Quiet. A little wrecked still. Like it had been waiting just inside her teeth for longer than she wanted to think about.
Jecka went still for just a second.
Then she tucked herself closer. Tightened her arm around Nicole's waist.
"I know," she murmured into her shoulder. Then softer, like it cost her nothing at all: "I love you too."
Nicole pressed her face into Jecka's hair.
She was smiling so hard it was almost stupid. Her face was completely out of her control and she didn't do anything about it.
The snow kept falling outside like it had nowhere better to be.
Neither did she.
Still Here
The apartment was bigger now. Lived-in in the way that took years, the good kind of accumulation, books doubled up on shelves, a secondhand chair they'd argued about buying and then immediately loved, photographs on the wall that hadn't been there and then suddenly had.
Nicole was in the middle of a very reasonable lecture.
"I'm not even mad," she was telling Bean, who sat on the kitchen counter next to the open treat cabinet with the specific energy of someone who had done exactly what they'd intended and felt no remorse. "I'm just asking you to explain your reasoning. Walk me through it."
Bean blinked.
The lights went out.
Everything cut at once. The hum of the fridge. The heater. The little blue standby light on the stove.
Nicole stood in the sudden dark with her arm still pointing at the treat cabinet.
She went very still.
Then she turned slowly toward the living room.
Jecka was already looking at her from the doorway. Had probably been watching the Bean lecture for longer than she'd admitted.
They said it at the same time.
"You have got to be kidding me." "You have got to be kidding me."
Nicole laughed first, Jecka half a second behind her, and then they were both laughing in the dark kitchen over nothing, over this, over the fact that this was their life and it kept doing this.
No panic.
No spiraling.
Just Jecka's face in the dimness, creased with laughing, familiar in the way that settled somewhere deep.
From the living room, Mocha did a delighted binky, apparently thrilled by the development.
Bean looked at the treat cabinet.
Looked at Nicole.
Blinked once, deeply unimpressed by everyone's reaction, and helped himself to another treat.
Nicole looked at him for a second.
"Okay," she said. "Fair enough."
The snow outside was really coming down now, thick and serious, the kind that meant morning would be white and muffled and slow. Through the window the streetlights were already just suggestions.
Jecka went for the candles without being asked.
Nicole watched her open the cabinet, the nice one they'd picked out together at that little shop on Clement Street, the one with the soft amber glass that threw warm light instead of harsh. The vanilla one Nicole had insisted on. The tall ivory taper Jecka had picked because she liked the way it burned even and slow.
She moved through it like she knew exactly where everything was, because she did, because this was their apartment and they had lived in it long enough that they moved through it in the dark without thinking.
Jecka struck the match.
The flare caught her face. Warm. Golden. The angle of her jaw, the small concentrated line between her brows, the way she shielded the flame with her palm.
Nicole knew that face.
She had been knowing that face for years and it still did the thing. Still landed somewhere in her chest with that particular weight. She didn't have a better word for it than that. It just. Landed.
She crossed the kitchen and stepped behind her.
Wrapped both arms around her waist. Chin on her shoulder. Cheek against her cheek.
Jecka leaned back into her without thinking, automatic, the way they fit.
"You're still dramatic about this," Nicole said.
"You married me."
Nicole smiled into her neck. "I would again."
She kissed just under Jecka's ear. Unprompted. Just because she was there and warm and the candle was lit and it was that kind of night.
Jecka turned her head slightly. Not pulling away. Just closer.
The vanilla candle burned steady between them.
Outside the snow kept coming. Mocha had migrated from wherever she'd been sleeping to sit in the window, watching it fall with great personal interest, her tail moving slow.
Bean had finished his unauthorized treats and was pretending he hadn't.
Nicole stayed where she was a moment longer, arms still around Jecka's waist, chin on her shoulder, just.
There.
Then Jecka turned and kissed her cheek and went to find the rest of the candles and Nicole watched her go and felt something so ordinary and so enormous she didn't bother trying to name it.
They built it slower this time.
No urgency. No pretending it was survival strategy. Just the two of them moving through the living room in the candlelight, pulling things from their places like they'd done it before, because they had.
Jecka got the big comforter from the bedroom. The oversized one they'd had since before this apartment, since before the one before it. It had gone through enough wash cycles that it had lost any specific smell and picked up theirs instead, soft in the particular way of things that have been used and kept and used again.
Nicole got the couch throws. Both of them. The decorative pillows too, the ridiculous oversized ones neither of them would admit to liking, and she dropped them in the pile without comment.
They laid it out without discussing the arrangement. They just knew.
Mocha appeared from wherever she'd been and hopped directly into the center of the comforter like she'd been consulted on the blueprints. She turned once and settled, deeply satisfied.
Bean circled the perimeter with great seriousness, then stepped onto Nicole's thigh the moment she sat down and arranged himself there like he'd issued a formal decree.
"He does this every time," Nicole said.
"He's consistent," Jecka said.
Nicole collapsed back against the pillows.
Jecka followed. Folded into her side like that was just where she went, like gravity had an opinion about it. No negotiation. No performance.
Nicole wrapped both arms around her.
No hesitation. No far edge of the blanket. No pretending she wanted to be anywhere else.
Mocha purred.
Bean purred louder, because Bean did not believe in being outperformed.
They fit. They had always fit. Nicole just hadn't known it for a little while, and then she had, and now here they were on the living room floor in the dark with their animals and their worn-out comforter and the snow falling heavy outside.
She pressed her face into Jecka's hair.
Stayed there.
Snow against the glass. Candles flickering gold.
Same as it ever was.
Jecka looked up at her.
"What's your worst fear?"
Nicole didn't reach for a joke. Didn't go for the snack answer, didn't deflect sideways into sarcasm. The impulse was there, old and familiar, and she just. Let it pass.
She looked down at Jecka's hand. Traced her thumb over the ring there, the weight of it, the fact of it.
"Waking up," she said. "And realizing I dreamed you."
Jecka's face did the thing. That complete, unguarded softening that Nicole had stopped trying to look away from years ago.
"You didn't," Jecka said.
Simple. Immediate. The same way she'd said I'd follow you on a living room floor a long time ago, like it was just obvious, like it didn't even require the full weight of a sentence.
Nicole kissed her.
Slow. Warm. Certain in a way she hadn't known she was capable of once, a long time ago, in a different apartment with the same snow and the same candles and all that pretending.
No pretending now.
Mocha flopped down directly beside their faces with immense dramatic energy, apparently feeling the moment required her physical presence.
Bean's purring kicked up to something that belonged in a engine bay.
Nicole laughed against Jecka's mouth.
Jecka smiled back.
The snow kept falling outside, heavy and soft and indifferent, and inside it was warm and gold and theirs.
Mocha had reclaimed the center of the comforter at some point and was now asleep in the specific boneless way that meant she was deeply, completely out. Bean had migrated up to the pillow territory and was doing the slow blink at nothing.
Nicole shifted. Stretched slightly. Jecka made a small sound of protest and tightened her arm.
"I'm not going anywhere," Nicole said.
"Good."
She settled back.
The candles were low but still going. The snow outside had that blue quality it got late at night, soft and directionless.
Jecka pressed her forehead to Nicole's.
"I love you."
Nicole smiled. All the way. The kind that used to scare her, too open, too much, nowhere to hide inside it. She didn't hide anymore.
"I know."
Then softer, into the small space between them.
"I love you more than I like breathing."
Jecka pulled back just enough to look at her. "That's intense."
"I'm intense."
"You are."
"And you married me anyway."
"I did."
"Voluntarily."
"Enthusiastically," Jecka said, and Nicole laughed, and Jecka kissed her while she was still laughing.
It started soft. Warm. Jecka's hand coming up to cup her face the way she did, thumb at her cheekbone, unhurried. Nicole's fingers found the hem of her shirt and stayed there, not pulling, just holding. Just the fact of her.
The kiss deepened slow. No urgency. Just the specific luxury of having all the time, of knowing this wasn't going anywhere, of being known completely by the person kissing you and kissing them back the same way.
Nicole's hand slid up her back. Jecka made a small sound against her mouth.
Their hands tangled somewhere in the blankets. The decorative pillows ended up somewhere they hadn't started. Mocha relocated with great dignity to the armchair. Bean stayed exactly where he was because Bean answered to no one.
Outside the snow was falling heavier now, thick slow curtains of it, the kind that made the whole world go quiet and soft and enclosed.
Inside was warm and gold and Jecka's mouth and Nicole's hands and the candles burning steady and the purring from somewhere nearby and none of it feeling like anything other than exactly right.
Nicole pulled back eventually. Pressed her forehead to Jecka's.
Just breathed.
"Hi," she said.
Jecka smiled with her eyes closed. "Hi."
Nicole stayed there.
Foreheads together. Noses almost touching. The candles burning low and the snow doing its thing outside and Bean purring somewhere in the blankets and all of it so specific, so theirs, so exactly what she hadn't known she was allowed to want until she'd stopped pretending she didn't.
She didn't move for a long time.
Neither did Jecka.
At some point the last candle went out.
Nicole woke up first.
Same as always.
Mocha was tucked against her ribs, small and warm and vibrating faintly. Bean was sprawled across both of them in a configuration that suggested he had expanded during the night, which was physically impossible and yet. He purred at a frequency Nicole felt in her sternum.
Jecka asleep against her shoulder. Breath slow and even. Hair a mess. Mouth slightly open in the way she'd deny if Nicole ever brought it up.
Snowlight poured in through the window, bright and diffuse, that particular winter morning quality that made everything look soft. The candles had burned out. The power was still off, she could tell without checking, the apartment had that held-breath quiet.
Nicole didn't reach for her phone.
Didn't run through the list of things. Didn't start the morning inventory her brain usually wanted to do first thing.
She just watched Jecka breathe.
Counted nothing. Measured nothing. Just watched.
She pressed a kiss into her hair.
"Still here," she said. Barely sound.
Jecka stirred. The small return from sleep, the slow blink that didn't quite open.
"Where else would I be," she murmured. Not really a question.
Nicole laughed quietly. The kind that was mostly just air, mostly just warmth.
She pulled her closer.
"No idea."
Bean's purring escalated for no reason. Mocha twitched against her ribs, some happy dream, feet moving slightly.
Outside the snow was still coming down. Soft and thick and unhurried.
The power could stay out.
Nicole closed her eyes.
They were warm anyway. They were home anyway.
That was everything.