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"Hey, babe."
"Hey, Kevvy."
Only Daria could deliver such a withering line, completely deadpan, without even looking up from her book. Jane has just barely slid into the seat across from her, in the last booth in the back by the window, at Boston's famous coffee shop The Bean Queen. They always sit in this spot when they meet up for their bi-weekly Saturday afternoon dates.
She arches one eyebrow up. It's only one in the afternoon: way too early for high school war flashbacks. "Never call me that again."
Daria flips her book closed, holding her place with her finger. "Now you know how I feel."
"Okay, point taken." She unwinds her scarf from around her neck, shoves it in the corner of the booth with her backpack, then starts unbuttoning her coat. The frigid, blustery dry air of a decaying winter is more than counter-acted by the artificial heat inside and she is roasting. "Baby?"
Daria doesn't twitch. "I am nineteen years old."
Jane's eyes narrow slowly. "Bro?"
And the book is open again, Daria's attention fully turned toward it. "I think we should break up."
"Okay, okay." A temporary surrender, for now. She holds up her hands, palms out, in capitulation, smiles as Daria finally closes the book for real and sets it aside. "No pet names today."
"Or ever."
"Or today." She reaches for the sugar to stir into her coffee. Daria's mug is still mostly full, so she already knows the answer, but she asks anyway, "You been here long?"
"Three pages." She has to take the train all the way in from Raft, whereas Jane's dorm on the BFAC campus is only a ten-minute walk away, and yet for some reason—probably that exact one—Daria always arrives at the Bean first.
They picked a good booth when they first started coming here in the fall, because the breeze that was then only mild, on its worst days refreshingly bracing, has become a brutal, sharp wind. It blows in with vengeance, wafting in a light dusting of snow across the entrance way, every time a new customer comes in. Lawndale never saw winters like this. And Jane would bet neither did Texas, or the little town in Virginia where Daria lived before that. Back in December, it was almost cute, even she could admit it: the city decked out in Christmas lights and the campus caffeine-addled from finals and buzzing with the anticipation of a long winter break. But now they're in the long slog of the season. And putting on three layers just to get to class is really getting old.
She takes her first sweet shot of coffee, and glances up, at the red and pink paper hearts that have been hung up from the ceiling as they blow about lazily in the breeze from the heating vents. There are pink garlands arrayed along the windowsill, and pink and white lights around the windows themselves, and another set of hearts, this time all in pink, pasted along the bottom of the bakery display case. By the cashier, a disturbing ceramic Cupid had eyed her threateningly as she gave her order.
"They're really going all out for Valentine's Day," Jane notes, and follows Daria's gaze as it wanders briefly up toward the ceiling, too. The gesture reminds her, all at once, of the Christmas party at Raft last December, the mistletoe in the doorway Daria had been too acutely aware of, the fantasy Jane had entertained only later, of somehow catching her beneath it. "Like it's a big holiday or something and not just a greeting card company conspiracy."
"Complex college mating rituals as a distraction from the brutality of Boston winter," Daria answers.
"That could be the title of a story."
"I'm hardly the person to write it."
Jane shrugs. "Why not?" She pokes Daria's foot under the table with the toe of her boot, tries with only some success to hold back her smirk. "You have a girlfriend. How'd you manage that if you don't know something about complex mating rituals?"
"Hmmm." She taps her thumb against the side of her coffee mug, the steam from it rising and coloring her cheeks a light rose-pink. "Sometimes I'm not really sure. I think the first step was getting out of Lawndale."
"Away from the repressive atmosphere of suburbia at the turn of the millennium?"
"Something like that."
It's half-joke but Jane feels it, too. She'd loved Daria in high school, loved her more than she'd ever loved anyone outside of her own immediate family—maybe more, even, than some of her older siblings, grown and out of the house before she even got a chance to know them. But she never could have said it then. And definitely not like this. The vocabulary just didn't exist. Girls who loved girls existed on TV, occasionally, and in news stories and sometimes in history books and definitely at art colonies, but they didn't live in her house. They weren't her.
"The second step was probably falling asleep in her dorm," she answers lightly. "The girlfriend's, I mean."
"That helped. Those twin sized beds are not big."
"And I could have been chivalrous and slept on the floor." She takes a sip of her coffee. Then she adds, letting her voice get slow and rocky again, like it used to when she almost never talked to anyone, "But I'm not chivalrous."
The corners of Daria's mouth quirk up.
Nothing had happened that first morning, not really, nothing but waking up to Daria's face so close to her she could have easily bumped her nose against Daria's nose, seeing it serene with sleep, almost obscenely naked without glasses. She'd fallen asleep with them on, squashed against the pillow. Jane had taken them off for her before she went to bed herself, and she'd known then that the morning would be awkward, but not the way that that first moment of waking and body heat and Daria's knee against her leg would shake something open in her.
Something that might have started cracking apart at Ashfield, or when Daria was dating Tom, or the first time Daria hugged her, ever, rain-soaked and mud splattered at the diner out by Swedesville.
"You have your moments," Daria answers. "Maybe you should turn 'Complex Mating Rituals' into an art installation instead."
"There's an idea." She smiles, a subtle upturn of her lips. "Can it include a naked portrait of you?"
"Nice try, Lane."
Jane shrugs. "You know I had to say it."
Raft on Sunday mornings is reliably quiet and serene. The only noises disturbing the stillness are the occasional pounding of footsteps up or down the stairs, or the slam of a door closing somewhere down the hall. The dorms at BFAC, by contrast, are always riotous, at all hours of the day someone blasting music, or drilling, or hammering. One of her neighbors has this habit of chanting in the early morning, for reasons still unknown. Jane thinks the difference can be explained by the nature of brains: they're just quieter than art students.
Daria says it's because they're all sleeping off their hangovers after Saturday night.
Either way, the atmosphere is great for sketching. This is the best place in the world, in the hours before noon on the last day of the week: the floor of Daria's dorm room, leaning back against her bed, with a sketchbook propped up on her knees. Sometimes she works out drafts of projects for school but today she's just bumming around, drawing a still life of Daria's roommate's teddy bear, which is resting against the pillows on the opposite bed. The roommate is the type of person to have a stuffed bear but she also thinks Daria's hydro-cephalic skull replica is cool, and she's so into the poster of bones above Daria’s desk that she's talking about getting them a whole skeleton. Plus she's a future Classics major, and she and Jane have had some great chats about Roman architecture and the aqueducts.
On Sundays she works at the library, so Daria and Jane have the dorm to themselves. Daria's in her usual spot on the bed, one hand holding her book open against her own bent knees and the other resting lightly on Jane's shoulder. This sort of contact between them, casual and slight but consistent, steady, still makes Jane's heart beat a little harder sometimes—because she's not big on physical affection, not a big hugger like Wind or a smooth flirt like Trent, and neither is Daria, and it would be so easy for them to exist next to each other in their own bubbles and not touch at all. And yet there’s this: the hand on her shoulder that feels so right and easy that sometimes she barely notices it's there. I feel you, I like you, I desire closeness with you . Maybe she's overthinking it but the gesture feels warm nonetheless, feels comforting like the quiet of the dorm or the warm air that flows in from the vents.
Sometimes Daria will squeeze her shoulder, without otherwise looking up, like maybe she doesn't realize she's doing it. Sometimes when she's stuck and needs some more inspiration, Jane will reach up and squeeze her hand.
She puts the finishing touches on the details of the bear's fur. "Hey, honeybun?"
"No one by that name lives here," Daria answers, and briefly takes her hand away so she can turn the page.
"Sunshine?"
"You have the wrong number."
"Panda bear?"
"Is that a reference to my glasses?"
"What? No." She slides her pencil into the spiral spine of the sketchbook, then impulsively lifts Daria's hand and presses a kiss to the heel.
That gets her attention. She lets the book fall forward on her chest, glances down at Jane, and asks, "What was that for?"
She shrugs. "I don't know. Do you think Marissa will appreciate this take on her room decor?" She slants the sketchbook to the side so that Daria can see her rendition of the toy: considerably more punk than the real thing, with bare patches in the shape of tattoos, piercings in the ears, and one eye boinging out of its socket from a spring.
Daria considers a moment. "Maybe," she admits. She edges a little closer to the side of the mattress, slumps down, and curls her arm around the top of Jane's chest in some odd version of a hug. It's not quite comfortable, but not terrible, and Jane will take the added closeness at the expense of a crick in her neck. She sets the sketchbook aside and curls her hand around Daria's arm, leans into the embrace.
"What are you reading?" When she tilts her head back, she can just make out part of the front of the book, shiny with the plastic covering the library put on it, reflecting a slash of overhead light. The image looks like a closeup of a statue of two nudes embracing. But the title doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with sculpture.
"Nothing," Daria lies, but Jane's already grinning.
"Daria, are you reading a book on how to be gay?"
"It's for a class."
"No, it's not."
"It's for an essay I'm writing. For class."
"Sure it is, kid."
Daria groans, lets go of Jane so that she can sit up, close the book properly, and set it on her bedside table. "It's really not a how to. More like a history."
"A history of being gay."
Daria's pretty when she blushes but Jane can only rag on her so much. She wraps her arms around her legs and shrugs as she looks up at her.
"If it helps, I think you're doing great."
"Thanks for the encouragement. I'm hoping to get an A in dating girls this year."
Jane holds her gaze a long moment. She can't tell what her own features are doing, what she looks like when she gets thoughtful and serious like this, but all she's thinking is that Daria looks terribly cute, and that she'd probably hate to hear it: a little awkward, a little uncertain, teetering on the edge of sincere. Eventually, she breaks Jane's stare and looks away.
"If someone asked, what would you call yourself?" she asks abruptly.
Jane.
"Dunno. Bi, I guess."
"Yeah, me too."
"Still feels a little weird to say it," Jane admits, as she uncurls herself and then jumps up onto the bed. She clambers over Daria’s legs, insistently imposing herself between Daria and the wall, then squashes herself into the sliver of mattress there. She falls back so that she's lying against the pillows, staring up at Daria's face. "You know I think you're pretty."
As expected, even the lightest compliment catches her off guard, and she stammers for a moment. She still never expects them—or at least not from Jane. This is a new vocabulary, too. When she recovers, she deadpans, "Are you trying to seduce me, Jane?"
"Daria, I am always trying to seduce you."
And maybe it's working. They've settled side by side, close together in the narrow twin, one of Jane's arms slung over Daria's hip. She leans forward and pokes her nose against Daria's nose.
Daria leans forward, tilts her head just so, and kisses her. It's the sort of soft, slow-building kiss that Jane likes more than she would ever admit, that Daria knows she likes even though she's never said it, because she can hear it in the quiet noises that pass between them and feel it in the tangle of Jane's legs with hers.
Jane pulls back, presses a kiss to the side of her mouth, to her jaw. "Should we put a sock on the door?" she jokes.
"If only we had a bonus sock when we needed one," Daria answers, bumping her knee against Jane's knee, and with unexpected softness, kisses her neck.
BFAC's latest student art symposium opens in the final week of February, at the tail end of a cold snap that Jane hopes will be the last of the year. Walking over from her dorm in the windless, frigid, clear night, she'd felt her nose and cheeks going numb, even the tips of her fingers, as her breath misted out in front of her in crystalline grey clouds. Daria's glasses had fogged over as soon as they slipped into the warmth of the entryway, and while she'd cleaned them off, Jane had gotten a head start on peeling off her various winter layers: pulling off her mittens and hat, unwinding her scarf. So she'd been able to watch, without distraction, when Daria finally took off her own coat.
Nothing at all sexy about it, Daria would have said if she'd known, about fiddling with buttons with frozen fingers, about wind-bitten cheeks, about glasses that won't stop fogging. But everything's a strip tease when you bring the right mind set to it. When you feel this way about a person. And it wasn't on purpose, anyway, that she'd thought it, that she'd seen Daria pull her coat off and thought: I'm here with a beautiful girl.
She'd called up yesterday and asked, embarrassed, without niceties, What am I supposed to wear to an art show?
Didn't find it funny when Jane said, Clothes. She'd smiled at her own joke instead and told her, I don't know, Daria. Just don't ask your sister for advice.
If I ever do that, have me committed.
What she'd ended up with was the black skirt she wore in high school, black tights and her usual boots, and a black long-sleeved shirt. She's wearing a necklace, too, a pedant on a long, silver chain. Jane didn't even know she owned jewelry. It feels not unlike seeing her wear lipstick to Alternapalooza, except that this time, this bit of effort is for her.
For a while now, they've been wandering the gallery in silence, lingering at any piece that catches either one’s eye. It's Daria who's stopped them up short next to an over-sized, realistic sculpture of a human heart titled Enlarged. Jane traces the veins, the valves, with her eyes. She's thinking about the contrast between muscle and blood, the constant involuntary work of one's organs, with the cutesy pink symbolism of the heart as pictograph. I heart U. I love you. I keep you in one of those parts of me that's always moving, always beating, that I never need to think about, that I need just to survive.
What Daria might be thinking, she as yet has no idea.
Further contemplation is cut off abruptly by a friendly, familiar voice behind her, calling her name.
"Oh—hey, Maya," she smiles, as she turns around to greet her. The girl approaching them is about their age, a couple years older, with long, silver-white hair and a matching silver stud in her nose. She's wearing a skirt made of scraps of purple and blue fabrics that Jane is quite sure she sewed herself.
"Yo, Jane. I'm glad you made it,” she says. “Turnout really sucks, huh? No one appreciates fine art anymore."
"Even fine arts students."
"Ha. Isn't it the truth?" She glances briefly around the space. "Do you have anything in the show?"
"No, I wish. I'm just a lowly freshman. We saw your painting in the other room, though. It's extraordinary." That's the truth, too. She's seen plenty of pretentious, masturbatory garbage in art school—but if her time at the art colony taught her any two things, one of them was to expect exactly that—but plenty of real masterpieces, too, shining among the rest. And Maya's the real deal.
"Hey, thanks. I almost didn't even submit it. But you got to put yourself out there, right?"
"Yeah, of course." She gestures to her left, where Daria has been quietly watching their conversation like it's a tennis match. "This is my girlfriend, Daria, a fellow art connoisseur."
"That might be a little strong," Daria answers. "The art connoisseur part."
Jane shrugs. "Yeah, she's more into words than pictures. My main goal in our relationship is to change that."
Daria shoots her a look, narrow-eyed and the corners of her mouth upturned, like good luck, and Maya laughs.
"Hey, that's cool. So you're not also at BFAC?"
"No, I'm a freshman at Raft."
"And you came all the way out here for the symposium?" She shakes her head. "My girlfriend's at BU and I couldn't drag her out. She's busy with some club meeting or something." Briefly, she reaches out and taps Daria on the arm, just above the shoulder. "Maybe you're more of a connoisseur than you think."
Daria's expression softens, so subtly that only Jane can see it, and she concedes, "Maybe," with a shrug. Jane barely listens as Maya says her goodbyes and then moves on. She's thinking about those syllables instead, the unexpected capitulation, the admission beneath them that Maya wouldn't be able to hear.
"Girlfriend?" Daria asks, once they’re alone, glancing at Jane out of the corner of her eye.
She arches one brow. "Main squeeze?"
They've never said it before, never all the way through. For a moment, Jane had really wondered if Daria was going to run. A paranoid thought, but not an impossible one: she's never been good with words when they crack open her ribs, with the soft underbelly of words, with confession.
She doesn't run. She reaches out and slips her hand into Jane's hand.
Jane finds her later in a room by herself, in front of a massive abstract painting, swaths of red and black across a stark white canvas. They'd gotten separated when Jane ran into a group of kids from her dorm, and now the space is starting to clear out, the gallery hushed and gently echoing in its increasing stillness.
She approaches quietly, as the moment seems to demand. Her footsteps still clack too loud, though, the thick heels of her boots impossible to soften against the shining wood floor. Daria doesn't turn, and when she's close enough, Jane slips her arms around her, leans down to press her nose against Daria's neck.
"Hey, sweetheart," she murmurs.
Into the silence after, she expects some smart-ass remark or a comeback, at least a scoff or an eye roll, and she braces herself for it, but hears nothing. Daria only runs her hands down Jane's arms, holds her hands like she wants to pull her closer.
"Mmmm," she hums.
Jane raises her eyebrows. "Oh? What's this? An endearment that meets Daria Morgendorffer's high standards?"
"What standards?"
"Don't change the subject on me, sweetheart." She squeezes her tighter, just for a moment, a hug to remind herself that Daria is warm and real and maybe even hers. "You don't hate that one."
"Yes. I don't hate it."
"Maybe even... like it?"
"Let's not go overboard."
Jane smirks. "All right. You tolerate it." That's still a victory. She presses a kiss behind Daria's ear.
Daria half-turns, still wrapped up in Jane's arms, and kisses her back. Beneath the high rafters and the bright gallery lights, she feels them all of a sudden as very small, and very close, and she wants to say all sorts of impulsive and romantic things, most of which Daria can probably already guess. Hey babe, hey sunshine, hey sweetheart—I really like you.
"But I really like you," Daria admits, and maybe it's the lingering Valentine's Day mood still in the air, or that they know each other well enough by now to read each other's minds, but the confession makes Jane honestly smile.
"I really like you, too," she admits, and pulls her close again.