Mag gives a small sigh and trails a hand over the dress she's to wear for the fair. It is a soft olive, cut low, and the fabric is expensive, exquisite. She hates it. Seventeen years ago, Mag wore plain dresses. What use was frippery to a blind girl? Relying on Marni's guiding hand, she fell through life and fell from grace, with the foolish stroke of pen across a devil's contract. She never once blamed Marni. How could she have known? After, her friend had pitched a fit, went to Mag in tears, wanting comfort, and said she couldn't live with Rotti, much less marry him. It took longer for her to follow through on that intention. By then, she was pregnant, and said that Nathan was the father.

Her best friend knew the truth and kept it hidden, of course. Anything for Marni. They only had that one night of comfort, after years of a complicated friendship; after years of love. Mag had relied on Marni's touch for so long, for that human connection: a hand in her hand, alighting on her shoulder, gliding down her back. Mag would lie on Marni's bed, in her shabby apartment, and Marni would hold her, press kisses to her breast. They talked about the impossibility of replacing Mag's eyes for ones that could see and not just feel when they made love. Neither could afford it.

And then Rotti came into the picture, sweeping up Marni in a whirlwind romance. Mag tried not to be bitter or jealous. She had no hold on Marni, after all, and eventually Mag had her eyes. But the hand that held hers during the procedure, the hand that was so very familiar to her, having touched every part of her from her cheek to her soul… that hand was cold and dead and gone when Mag came to. Aside from pictures of her love, she would never look at Marni.

Mag sighs and touches the dress, begins to strip and slide into it. She holds onto that one night, afraid to let it slip away. These eyes can see and project whatever she wants except that.

That night.

Marni approached in the doorway, weeping, her tears matching the pearls around her neck. Mag hadn't yet had the surgery. Blind Mag, still blind. She traced the place where the tears were falling and brought Marni into an embrace as she whimpered, "Oh, Mag, I didn't know. I didn't. Oh, Mag, did he know?"

Rotti had visited Mag in her new bedroom and pressed her down into the sheets, murmuring that there was the fine print. Yes, Rotti knew. Mag shook her head and said no, he couldn't have known. It must have been a terrible mistake.

"I don't love him anymore," Marni confessed.

"Is there someone else you love?"

"You. It's always been you," Marni lied. Mag didn't care. She would take what she was offered. As always, at the mercy of someone else, someone who could not just see, but had illumination. Marni's love was inconstant, fleeting as spring.

A kiss, soft at first, and then not so. The engagement ring was removed and placed on a table with an audible clink. "I won't live here, and neither will you. I'll find a way around a contract. There has to be a way. We shouldn't live like this. We're free, we're free." To quiet the fantasies, Mag's trembling fingers found the ties to Marni's dress. Her nightgown followed. Their hands met in the constant darkness that was her world. A click of a lamp snuffed out, so her love could join her in moving in the dark.

"Say you love me," Marni murmured, her glossy lips to the side of Mag's neck. "Say it."

"You know I do."

"Can you ever forgive me?"

"I had long before you asked, dear."

Long, white fingers quested between thighs. It had been too long, and Mag's heart was pounding. Wondering if Marni felt that way, she pushed aside the woman's bra, explored the soft flesh of her breast with her lips, her tongue. And then Marni's finger crooked against Mag, and she gulped a gasp, helpless.

"You want me, don't you?" said the whisper in Mag's ear as she stroked, teasing. "You want me to undress you. Taste you."

Mag closed her eyes to pretend the dark was from that and nodded, trying desperately to keep her air of nonchalance, to show little reaction. There was a shuffle. A knee pressed with insistence between her legs. So much for dignity. Mag's hands tightened, were soon joined by her lover's. The knee moved just enough to encourage her hips to rise, her thighs to tighten at the pressure in a feeble attempt to hold what made her deliciously ache.

It was always Marni who gave the most pleasure, while taking what she wanted: affirmation that she was something—someone—to be desired, loved. It wasn't greed but desperation that fueled this need, and she became what others needed her to be. She raised Mag's legs, kissed her knee and went up, planting kisses. The friendship was real enough.

Sex blurred the boundaries. For Mag, at least. Soon as Marni found someone else to love, she'd be gone. It would be this one night. Mag knew this in her heart.

Unexpectedly, she was divested of her lingerie, a dramatic and serene moment of anticipating, and Marni's tongue, tracing her intimately. Questing, seeking, needing to make her friend happy after all the unhappiness.

Mag suspected her friend noticed the nights when Rotti was absent in their bed. Nothing was said, but they both knew. Perhaps that was part of the visit and the lovemaking that followed, when Mag cried out and quickly stifled it, when her body violently shook and went slack, when she said again in breathless tones, "Yes, yes, I love you." When asked why, she simply said, "You're my dearest friend."

Her only friend. They held hands in the dark. She woke up alone.

Mag traces the fabric. Marni would have loved it, and seventeen years later, Mag hates it. She is always as Marni left her: naked and alone and, despite her new eyes, blind.