Title: To Wear Sunlight
Disclaimer: If you recognize 'em, they ain't mine.
Pairing: Joan/Adam, Joan/Judith, Joan/Other, Joan/God, Joan/Grace, me/sleep deprivation
Notes: Another one that's written at four in the morning. Slightly blasphemous. Very gay. In-depth notes on my website, where the formatting also happens to be prettier.
Adam was your first love, and he always will be, even after you gave him your heart and he knowingly broke it on a cruel April morning. It was almost easier to love him afterwards, when things grew simpler between you two. When you no longer needed him, when it became all right to have secrets and no obligation to share them with anybody.
o o o o o
Judith was the first girl who had ever kissed you. Her kisses were the kind you see in movies, the kind teenage girls believe redefine their whole lives --- spontaneous and tantalizing, with a touch of desperation. They were made all the more memorable because it was the loneliest time of your life, and she was all you had to hold onto.
Judith hurt the ones she loved, used their secrets against them. But you loved her anyway, though eventually you learned that loving somebody does not necessarily mean she won't leave you.
o o o o o
Sullivan was not about love. You met him three months after your father's death. It was a terrible day: the sun was bright, the skies were clear, the air smelled faintly of fresh-cut grass and burnt candy. There shouldn't be days like that when your father is dead. People shouldn't be able to continue going to work and going to school and eating dinner and cleaning the house and worrying about missing their favorite television shows.
It was the first day that you managed to live through without thinking of your father, not even once. This realization did not hit you until later that night, and when it did, it overwhelmed you with a sickening sense of something that you could not describe. It was one of those feelings that the Germans probably have a made-up word for, like schadenfraude or weltschmerz. It was the kind of grief that cannot be defined in the English language.
You went to a bar and tried to purge yourself with alcohol, to take the edge off the pain that had started in your chest and spilled over into the rest of your body. Sullivan saved you from a couple of frat guys and listened to you talk about how your father always came into your room to kiss you goodnight, even when it was four in the morning and he'd just come back from work.
You had sex with Sullivan that night. It was your first time and it hurt. But through the pain you remember Sullivan hitting someplace high, and you remember yourself telling him that even though it hurt, it fucking hurt like you'd never hurt before, nothing would ever feel so good again.
o o o o o
You kissed God once. That last time, when he came to say goodbye. It was a he, the first he, the one you met on the bus to Arcadia High. When he told you he was leaving, you didn't feel relief. You had none of those finally! I can be myself again feelings you used to think you'd have.
Instead, you felt cheated. Like he was abandoning you again, the way he did that summer all those years ago. He knew what you were feeling before you said it, and it was still annoying, even though it was the last time. Technically I'm everywhere, he told you, So you really never stop seeing me.
Driven by some absurd impulse, you leaned up and pressed your lips against his. The world didn't end, the earth didn't crack open, lightning didn't strike you down. God tasted like something that can't be explained, like sunlight.
o o o o o
You kissed Grace first. After more than ten years of being friends, during most of which Grace supposedly had a crush on you (you always swear that you never knew, and people usually roll their eyes and call you thick), you were the one who finally did something about it.
Loving Grace is different from loving Adam, or Judith, or God, or whoever. Loving Grace is not about big, sweeping circumstances. It is about all the small things: fighting over what to TiVo, arguing about politics (or rather, your indifference toward politics), waking up in the morning to the aroma of coffee and burnt toast.
When you kiss Grace, you taste salt and strawberries and everything that strings together to make up your life.
And when you hold her hand, there is never any space left between your fingers.
lovers alone wear sunlight
- e. e. cummings