Jane woke up, still tangled in the remnants of her cowboy outfit. She groaned and rubbed her face.
"I can't believe we have to go home today," she grumbled, pulling Maura tighter against her.
"We do both have an abundance of leave," Maura said, stroking across the plain of Jane's exposed stomach. "We could do this sort of thing more often."
"Looks like I've been saving it up for a honeymoon," Jane said, looking over at Maura, her hair tousled in the dawn light, her face bare and the freckles usually covered in a light dusting of makeup easily visible. Jane had meant to map those freckles like the night sky, to observe the constellations and name each of them, to kiss each shining star before it disappeared in the daylight. "We could go up to Canada," Jane said, thinking of her meagre bank balance. "I could get my passport," Jane said wistfully, thinking of all the places she'd wanted to go as a child and somehow never had time for. She looked over at Maura again, eyes narrowed. "And you need a very good lawyer to write you a very good pre-nup." Jane said seriously. "Even before we start talking dates."
"My family has one drafted, but I wasn't going to -"
"You should. Just because it's me doesn't mean I'll always do the right thing by you, you know how marriages get when there's money involved."
Maura sighed, digging her face deeper into Jane's neck. "We really do see the worst of people, don't we?" She asked. "I'll do it, if only so you won't have a motive if I get murdered."
"Aww, trying to protect me from a murder investigation, so sweet," Jane said, a little sarcastically.
"You're just lucky I have no motive to murder you," Maura retorted. "Angela is flying down to Florida mid-week, so you could just stay the whole week, if you wanted to. Jo's already there."
"You want me to?" Jane asked, feeling a little insecure.
"After a week of this, to go back to my own house, to be alone, to sleep alone - please," Maura said.
"I'd miss you too," Jane said. "Ok, I feel less bad about going home if I'm going home with you. I'm going for a jog - want me to make some coffee or bring some back?"
"Neither, I'll come with you," Maura said, reluctantly releasing Jane's suede waistcoat.
They jogged past The White House, then up to the George Washington statue, down to the Lincoln memorial then across to the Washington Monument and back to the hotel, stopping to grab coffee on their way back.
Jane would have been happy to throw everything into her suitcase, but she was aware that Maura was covertly watching her, aware that she had a tendency to get a bit feral at times. She folded things, even though she was aware they were just going to be put in Maura's high-tech washing machine as soon as they got back to Boston.
"I'm messy," Jane said suddenly. "And you're obsessively neat. What if we can't live together?"
Maura looked around the hotel room. Jane had managed to put her clothes away, had managed to throw the trash in the bin, had managed to wash their mugs every morning. She wondered if it had been a concern for Jane this entire time.
"I try to clean up after myself, but a lot of the time I'm straight out the door once the phone rings, and home after midnight, and I'd rather get some sleep than try to clean up, and then it compounds..."
"I've been to your appartment, Jane," Maura reminded her gently.
"But that's my space. I don't want to stress you out in your own home."
"Jane, do you remember the first time Hope came over?"
"Yeah, that was rough."
"It was, and what I remember most about that night now is how you made me take a wine and sit down with Angela, with her holding me even though she didn't know why yet, and you cleared the table and ran the dishwasher and put everything away before you came down and sat with me, and you took my hands and said that no matter what, I had your family, and I had my family, and Hope and Cailin were just people I was getting to know. That they didn't have to be family if I didn't want them to be family, and your hands were wrinkled from the dishes and I felt so - you knew I'd have stayed up cleaning for hours if you'd let me, so you didn't let me. And you always offer to clean up."
"I just worry - if I live there, I'll stop seeing things out of place and putting them back, like I do in my place."
"Nothing in your place has a place, that's why you leave things everywhere," Maura said. "Well, part of it."
"You'll be patient?" Jane asked, grimacing.
"I'll try," Maura said. "But you have to try too."
"Ok," Jane picked up Maura's suitcase and set it down, grabbing her own as well. "You do a walk-through, I'll put these in the car."
Maura joined Jane at the front desk to return the keys. The hotel had clearly realised their mistake but hadn't mentioned it or asked for the second room back, and Maura could see Jane winding up to tease them about it, so she dug her elbow into Jane's ribs.
Maura looked dreamily out at the woods as Jane drove through upstate Maryland and New York, watching eagles overhead and streams babbling past. She thought back to riding through the woods, her eyes drifting shut, imagining her and Jane in costume, riding through the woods two hundred years ago, and two hundred years into the future.
Jane looked over at Maura, sleeping peacefully in the passenger seat as she stopped at a traffic light. She hadn't known, for so long, that what she'd been looking for had been right beside her.
Notes:
Not leaving the house and WFH has me pretty feral ngl.