Sex disclaimer: Bits and pieces regarding f/f sex. If that squicks you, grow up. Like, really.

Many thanks to the fabulous Ann Page, who betaed and suggested and otherwise makes my life very wonderful.
 
 

She imagines Trent walking in. Long shaft of light out of the hallway and some sentence that begins with a half-stoned, "Janey . . . ." Then some silence. His long body in the doorway very still while he plays with one of the half-dozen piercings in his left ear. Then just a soft, warm, "Hey," addressed entirely to her, the moment of understanding she's been waiting for from him for a long time. Maybe a little acknowledgement of what he missed. And the little protective grin he allows for Jane when he thinks she isn't watching.

He doesn't come in, though. He's somewhere deep in the basement, playing his guitar. Daria can hear him. The sound comes up through the furnace vent -- tinny, though that might just be the quality of Trent's playing. She heard him come up to the kitchen earlier, heard him rummage around in the fridge and the cupboard, heard him make a small howl of satisfaction at whatever food-like entity he'd created. She leaned forward a little, enough that she could press her palm against the floor, and felt his joy. Wanted to give him hers.

She's very used to the girl-smell of this room. Not the pink-mall-girl-smell that makes Quinn's personal space so cloying, or even her own -- that edge of fruit-shampoo and books that she's only started to notice lately. This is peculiarly Jane. Her faintly-scented deodorant and the sinus-cutting edge of her paints and the warm-flesh smell that she's gotten to know far more intimately tonight.

Nothing in her education prepared her for Jane's beauty when she was naked and stretched back on her too-red bedspread, but she isn't surprised by that. Daria's stopped expecting suburbia to encompass anything as essential as this woman's beauty, or her flat-footed grace. Her choked half-giggle when Daria pressed her lips to the inside of one thigh and whispered, "God you have a beautiful pussy. Can I touch it?" Her extra little hitch when Daria choked on "pussy" and had to try twice to get it out. She hadn't thought she was quite that uptight, but apparently she was.

Not so much anymore, apparently, and she's getting used to better things. Like warm skin. Like the shape of Jane's belly and how oddly grateful she is that Jane has one. Very, very pale, and childishly round, and marked a little by the waistband of her panties.

She hasn't felt this kind of concentrated euphoria more than four or five times in her life. In a minute she's going to have to admit to it out loud, and if she's not careful Jane will wake up and notice and she'll never hear the end of it. So she thinks about other things. Like the fact that this is going to be written all over her skin tomorrow. One of her grandmother's irritating pronouncements, that love and a cough cannot be hid. And everyone is going to notice. Trent. The neighbours. Everyone at school. Brittany, who probably still won't get it. Jodie, who won't say anything, but who'll grin that tiny, secret grin she has.. Mr. O'Neill, who will try very hard to be delighted, and may explode from the effort. Which alone would make this worth it, even if she weren't still tremblingly happy.

The Evil Fashion People, who will almost inevitably have nothing nice to say, but she can imagine them impaled on the stack-heels of their own dangerous shoes.

Quinn won't be surprised. But once she thinks about it, it's going to blow her tiny mind.

Her mother will secretly be happy for her. The way she is more often than she usually admits.

Jane's heart in her sleep beats very slowly. The anal-retentive data-storage part of her mind imagines how huge, how strong, Jane's heart must be to keep her blood flowing, to keep her warm, when it strikes only a little more than once every second. Daria bends over and kisses it. Lips against Jane's very-white skin. Loving the texture of it. Loving the nipple that just brushes one of her cheeks.

And then the door does crack open, but it's not Trent, it's Jane's mom. Who perches against the doorframe in all her disconnected artist-beauty that Daria's not usually aware of, being too aware of the woman's penchant for neglecting all and sundry that doesn't relate to her potter's wheel. But she looks it now, and she's not upset, not even at the splay of Jane's legs, or the suddenly obvious nakedness of Daria's breasts.

Tiny grin that Daria can just bring herself to return. "Goodnight, Mrs. Lane."

But she doesn't expect the woman to actually come in. For a second she thinks Mrs. Lane has lost her mind. Then she imagines hippie-woman actually losing it and siccing the PTA on the terrible, twisted girl who's ravished her daughter.

Slightly rough potter's hands catch her chin and pull her into a sitting position.

"Oh my. You are lovely, aren't you?" Daria blinks at her. "Janey's very lucky."

And leaves, and leaves her sitting up, and gradually wrapping herself around her drawn-up knees, thinking. That, oddly, with all her plans, she wasn't quite ready for approval. She isn't entirely sure what to do with it.