Quiet evenings alone seemed just so hard to find yet here one is, beckoning them ever closer together.
She smiled as she listened to the steady thumping of the rain outside and the gentle, playful sounds of hooves outside.
All she wanted to do however was lean across the table and kiss her beloved who had already been through much, too much.
They were left to pick up the fragments of the one that managed to make things seem whole for them.
Chiara as she had been called before she'd fled with her sister, Alice, was staring out the window as if it held the answers to what they'd once had, and all Carmen could do was watch the once runaway who had found love with her sister and a stranger that she'd met after having opened up a farm with her sister.
Carmen had only known her as Lovina and her sister as Felicia and yet she found that both names fit them so well with their warm wrapping around them.
Lovina was one who attempted to hide her pain though sometimes those attempts seemed minuscule for how difficult pain can be to conceal.
She was the one who fought the hardest for them, cried the most though hid it well when her sister died, and she was the one who blamed herself, the one who bore the burden sealed onto her heart with its own scars.
Carmen could not find the words, the correct way, to attempt to soothe some of the pain, an attempt to build back up a new life together while never truly forgetting the old.
She was the one to work the farm whenever she realized that Lovina couldn't despite how often the girl made it seem like she could, she was the one to watch her, look out for her, to wonder if both sisters had dealt with the same pain, the same burden of worry.
Carmen was the type of person who thrilled over leaning forward and kissing the pain away, thrilled over comforting every tear with a small moment of affection.
She couldn't do that with death, definitely couldn't piece back together the broken shards of who they both are, the tatters from a broken heart.
The Spanish woman stood up, wandered past the window that shown the harshness of the rain that pelted it, and finally stood directly in front of Lovina, and leaned in to kiss her, to feel those broken shards come together in a lost assortment of who they were, who they'd always been.
Lovina kissed her back, tentative strokes back, until finally she leaned in further, fell more into the kiss, grew passionate in an almost harsher, sadness filled way before she calmed from the kiss, leaned away when she felt she had to.
Carmen still could see tear stained cheeks and the cold hit of reality to her eyes as she leaned in, soothing the tear marks with gentle kisses, not demanding anything in return.
True love never was greedy, so she stood patiently kissing every physical mark of pain that her girlfriend bore and then some.
She could spend forever kissing every ache and pain away and yet that would never be enough.
Carmen sighed into a gentle kiss on the cheek and hoped that they'd grow stronger in time, that the ache would feel less like their hearts were being ripped open, and that somehow they'd come together as two in a way that had grown from all of the life and the beauty of their third member that they'd never forget.
She smiled and hoped that every day they'd fight and grow stronger and learn to fall in love with each other all over again despite the harsh tug of a broken heart in each of their chests.
Time could only tell, but still Carmen hoped for the best with a prayer on her lips as she tried to kiss away as much of the pain that would fall like pebbles into her hands.
It was going to be a rough road, but the end should be much brighter than the harsh beginnings of a new trip.