“Definitely not. It was more of an idle question.”
“It didn’t sound idle to me.” Danika’s sleeping bag rustles, and she’s suddenly closer. “But maybe I’d tell you that since meeting you?—”
“Since I forced my way into your life, you mean.”
“There is that.” A pause. “But since I met you—and at the time I thought it was the end of my world—I’ve relearned… Maybe not happiness. Not yet. But I’ve relearned the potential for that. I don’t know that I can ever let go of what Chris did to me—to us—but I’m trying. I have to, so that it doesn’t eat me up.”
“Remember the good times.”
“Yes.” Another pause. “But I don’t want to talk about Chris, even though I was the one who brought him up.”
“What do you want to talk about?” Kim asks. She can almost hear her heart beating in the quiet tent. A wave rumbles to shore, then another, as she waits for Danika’s answer.
“Us,” Danika says. “I want to talk about us. And…where we go from here.”
Kim’s breath catches in her chest, a suspended moment that’s neither inhale nor exhale. “What do you mean?”
“You’re becoming important to me.” Danika looks down at the space between them. She picks at a loose thread on her sleeping bag. “I don’t know how to say this. Especially as I don’t have your knowledge of how it is between women. But I’m comfortable with you. Maybe even more so than with Mirza. At first, I thought it was because of the girls. That their closeness was somehow making me more receptive to you. But I don’t think it is.”
Kim waits. She’s not sure where Danika is going with this.
Danika raises her head and stares Kim straight in the eyes. “This will sound weird. But I have…thoughts about you. I don’t think of you entirely as a friend. I don’t think of you as the woman who took my husband anymore. But I do think of you. Often. And when we nearly kissed… I think of that all too much, and I wonder…” Her fingers twitch on the sleeping bag.
Has reality become twisted? Of all the things she thought Danika might say, she never expected such raw honesty, such bravery, such an unveiling of her feelings.
Memories surface of times when Kim declared her burgeoning feelings. A risk taken, only to be friend-zoned in the nicest way, or, on one embarrassing occasion, laughed at, and then humiliated when Melissa told her friends about Kim’s declaration.
Kim shifts her bag closer to Danika’s. The space between them—both physical and emotional—has narrowed to a sliver.“Thank you. For your honesty. And boldness. Thank you for gifting me your feelings.”
“It’s okay if you don’t return them,” Danika says. “I’m not even sure myself what they are yet. If I’m confused. If I’m clinging to you for other, less healthy reasons. If I’m trying this to give Cami and Bella something more. If, in some weird and twisted way, I’m seeing you as a replacement for Chris. Even if this is some fucked-up revenge fantasy.”
“Ssh.” Kim places a gentle finger on Danika’s lips.
Danika’s eyes, wide and startled, stare at her.
“I’ve been wondering too. About myself. About us. About what we could be if we only let ourselves. If you wanted.”
Danika heaves a breath, her chest rising and falling rapidly. “Will you kiss me? Properly? If you want to, of course. If you don’t, that’s okay.”
“I want. Right now, it’s all I can think of.”
“Then please…”
Danika seems frozen in place. Despite her request, for all her words, her body language is reserved, folded in.
Gently then.
Slowly, so Danika can move away if she wants, Kim leans closer. Her fingers dance a path along Danika’s shoulder, glide up the side of her neck where a pulse pounds. She strokes a finger along Danika’s jawline, circles the point of her chin, and continues up the other side.
Danika’s breathing is loud in the tent. Somewhere outside of this cocoon, their daughters sleep, the surf crashes, and there’s a quiet hop-hop of a grazing kangaroo. But in the here and now, there’s only Danika, staring at her hopefully, nervously, in the torchlight, her eyes wide.
And then Danika is the one who moves. She leans in, and Kim’s fingers fall away from Danika’s face. Her breath puffs onKim’s skin, and then her lips touch down in a butterfly kiss. Like the breath of wings, like starlight tumbling from the sky.
Oh.Kim closes her eyes as the kiss lifts like a butterfly from a flower, then returns to alight upon her lips again.
Emboldened, she leans into the kiss, makes it something more, something that isn’t friendship, but isn’t lovers. Not yet.
Maybe never? She doesn’t know, but she’s in this now, and she’s not turning back.
