"Are you close?" Jane whispers into the sweaty hollow of Maura's throat.
Maura's neck cranes back on the pillow in frustration. Jane watches the tendons tense, a vein throb with Maura's pulse. Her face is completely and utterly flushed a frantic pink. Blonde wisps are stuck to her clammy temples. Jane thinks that she is so, so beautiful.
Jane works her hand faster.
"Jane," Maura drawls, needy and desperate. "More."
With three fingers already inside Maura, Jane curls them harder. Maura's fingers dig further into her lower back, hungry. Wild. Maura moans, and quickly, as Jane's thumb drags down harder against her clit, Maura falls. Curses come from her lips, and Jane swallows them eagerly in a kiss.
Nothing ever, ever feels as good and right and true as the roll of Maura's naked chest, her breasts, against Jane's own as this particular kind of quiet settles over them.
Maura pulls at Jane's bottom lip with her teeth. She lets it go slowly, reluctantly. "I'm sorry I took so long," she says, her voice raw with exhaustion. "Ever since I gave birth I've found that achieving climax is—
"I know. Don't apologise," Jane whispers, pressing her forehead against Maura's. "I love making you feel good. However long it takes."
She feels Maura's hands slide lower, past her lower back. Jane smiles at the touch. But her lower body is less innocent. With a mind of its own, her pelvis flexes, pressing down into Maura so that their centres kiss. Jane shifts in embarrassment of the reflex, dropping her head to the pillow above Maura's shoulder. Maura's head tilts, following Jane's shyness. "Do you want me to make love to you again—
"No. We need to go."
A deafening silence passes over them as Jane rolls over. After an hour of love-making, and then at least two thirds an hour just fucking, Jane is spent.
Muffled voices pass by the door of their hotel room. Jane looks to the tightly drawn, crisp white curtains, and feels a pang of emptiness at the remembrance of a life outside where Maura is her sister-law. Her niece's mother. Her brother's wife.
The bed shifts as Maura rolls closer, propping herself up on an elbow next to Jane. Maura's manicured hand dances over Jane's abdomen. Her gaze on the ceiling, Jane swallows at the touch, silently reprimanding the place between her legs for responding to the touch.
She can feel Maura's gaze burning into the side of her cheek.
"I don't know when we can do this again."
Jane bites the sides of her cheek to fight off the tears she can feel welling beneath her eyelids.
Maura continues. "I don't know if we should."
Jane closes her eyes. "Yeah."
Maura shifts down the bed, and Jane can feel the sheet being pushed further down toward the base of the mattress, more so than it already has been. As Maura rests her head against Jane's breast, blond hair tickles Jane's collarbone. Jane's fingers twitch, wanting to touch it. To run her fingers through it as she did the moment they stepped into the room.
Against her better judgment, with an aching spot in her chest, Jane wraps an arm around Maura, pulling her against her. She opens her eyes to look down at Maura's profile, but the blond is distracted, tracing the white lines of childhood scars across Jane's olive skin.
Minutes pass. Jane knows it needs to be over. Tonight, and always. But it won't be. It won't be a month before she checks into the Boston Marriott again, draws the curtains, and sits on the edge of the bed, waiting for her best friend to knock. This is only the second time—well, third if she counted that first fuck in her apartment, and she did—but it already feels like routine. Like home. Like salvation.
"Jane," Maura whispers. She presses her lips against Jane's nipple in a gentle kiss. "I love you."
Jane's entire body shudders, pulses, flushes with a wholeness she has never known. Her face is on fire.
Her eyes slam shut, and her neck twists on the pillow toward the door.
Maura's fingers tilt Jane's head back toward her. "Look at me."
Jane does.
"Oh, Jane."
"I…" Jane tries to start, but her voice is empty.
A ferry horn sounds nearby. The Salem Fast Ferry, Jane guesses, on its final voyage home.
Maura clears her throat. "I need to go home. Ever since fall began, Frankie's been getting home by six, and that's Alex's worst hour." Jane watches as Maura searches the ground for her clothes amongst Jane's. Her hair is wild. Maura continues, "He won't go down without a fuss and Frankie just doesn't know how to settle him so that he'll sleep through."
Jane sits up against the headboard, picturing her brother at home attempting to calm his eleven month old, waiting for his wife of three years.
Three years.
Back when it all began, the jealousy, the fighting, all culminating in a single, life changing realisation for Jane.
And she'd lived with it. Allowed it to kill her every day for months. Almost a year. And then Maura had fallen pregnant, and Frankie had taken off on a six month stint undercover and Jane had stepped up and fallen in love with her best friend all over again.
Doctor's appointments, furniture shopping, you name it: where Frankie couldn't be, Jane was.
Maura was five and a half months pregnant when it happened.
It was summer, and the swell of Maura's belly in a sundress made Jane feel warm and complete in a way she couldn't understand. She should have despised the bump, the ultrasound pictures. But Maura was more beautiful than ever.
Maura had spent a ridiculous amount of money on a membership to a day spa up in Cambridge, which included 24 hour access to what Maura called a 'revitalisation room'. Jane had been happy to call it whatever Maura wanted her to as long as she could escape the extreme heat and submerge her body in something larger than Maura's tub.
At eleven p.m. that summer night, the room was empty. As they sat on the edge of the indoor pool, Maura pulled her sundress up and sighed as the cool water came to her knees. Jane tried not to look down at the alabaster flesh of Maura's naked thighs. Instead, she followed the way the shadows of the illuminated water danced across the walls of the room in waves.
Suddenly, inside Maura, Alex had kicked. Maura had reached for Jane's hand to feel.
His little foot, or a fist maybe, reached out against the pressure of Jane's touch.
Maura's soft laugh echoed around the tiled pool room.
Jane wanted to grin, but she was sure her heart was slowly dying. It wouldn't be like this for much longer.
"Maura."
Maura interlocked their fingers. "Mmm?" she questioned distractedly, her eyes closed, in utter bliss. Jane watched Maura's calves circle through the water.
Jane's other hand pushed off the tile behind her, and gently threaded into the side of Maura's hair.
Maura's eyes opened. In seconds, it turned dark, threatening, knowing. "What are you doing?"
Maura knew.
Jane searched that gaze for only a moment before she covered Maura's lips with her own, swallowed her whimper, slid the other hand across Maura's belly, and pulled her closer.
For a long, wonderful moment, it was perfect. For a long, wonderful moment, Maura wanted Jane, too.
Maura spoke Jane's name into her lips. Trembling, Jane pulled back.
"Jane," Maura choked, her eyes glassy and panicked. "You're my sister."
Maura was frightened.
Jane wanted to drown.
"I'm in love with you."
Maura shook her head, terrified. "You…you have to fall out of love with me, okay?" she said, her tone bordering on irritation.
Jane bit her lip, wanting so badly for the woman who had eagerly, passionately returned her kisses moments before. "I don't know if I can, Maur."
Maura had shed many hormonal tears of recent weeks, but in that moment, they were freefalling and sob-less. "Jane, I wish you hadn't done that," she whispered brokenly, her eyes cast toward the dancing shadows. "Promise me you will never, ever do it again."
Jane was quiet.
Two weeks later, Frankie was home.
Now, Jane watches Maura tie her hair into a bun in the bathroom mirror. From the bed, Jane catches Maura's gaze in the reflection.
"What?" Maura asks, a deeply troubled expression edging its way onto her face.
Jane looks down.
In her peripheral vision, she sees Maura flick off the bathroom light. She places her handbag on the end of the bed.
"I'll fix you up with cash for the room," Maura says sheepishly. "I know how expensive it is for us to be together since your mother is always popping by your apartment—
"I've got it." Jane raises her glance. "You don't have to 'fix me up'".
Maura nods gently, her eyes locked on Jane's.
Jane swallows.
"I…" Maura starts, her voice wavering. "I don't know if I can stop this."
Jane clenches her jaw against tears.
"Jane…I'm just so confused."
Silence. "Yeah, me too."
"I can't imagine what it's like for you to know that I go home to Frankie, when you…" she trails off.
"What?" Jane wonders, her voice empty of emotion. "When I go home to an empty apartment?"
The ferry horn sounds again.
"Do you love my brother?"
Maura licks her lips. "No."
Jane bangs her head back against the bedhead in frustration. "I don't even want you to leave him. That's what hurts the most."
Maura sits down on the end of the bed.
"I used to be different," Jane whispers. "I never thought I was capable of something like this."
"I know."
Jane bites her bottom lip. "He can never know about this."
Maura moves closer to Jane. Softly, she presses her lips to Jane's.
Jane's lips don't move against hers.
"He won't," Maura says, her eyes glassy with the struggle of uncertain promise. "I will take this with me to my death bed."
Maura presses a lingering kiss to Jane's temple. "I love you with my whole heart," she says, the last words broken in a sob.
And she is gone.
For now.