When Maura came in to the spare room, Jane was lying on the right side of the bed. Maura didn't want to hover over her; Jane even being here suggested that she felt safe with Maura, despite their patchy attempts at friendliness at work. Maura didn't want to sit down on the edge of the bed and look down at her; she worried that would make Jane feel infantile, that it would make her wonder if Maura pitied the usually brave, strong woman. So she lay down next to her, got on her level, and laughed at Jane's silly, nervous joke, because she didn't have an answer for that question. It meant she had to sit up a little when Jane started upright as Bass moved around, so she could use her right hand to smooth over the soft cotton of Jane's jacket. Jane didn't think Maura was smothering her, didn't think Maura was too much. Not now. And she lay back down, reassured by Maura's assertation that it was merely her bigass tortoise bumping into stuff in the darkness outside the room. Eventually Maura turned the overhead light off, leaving on the bedside lamp and Jane, who never admitted to being scared but already had earlier tonight, thanked Maura in a small, grateful voice.
It worked out well. When Jane struggled awake from a nightmare, Maura was able to slip her right arm over her, where she was curled away from Maura, and pull her in close, back against Maura's chest, where Jane rolled over and buried herself into with great, heaving sobs. Maura's right arm held her close, her dominant hand working over her back.
The next time they gravitated naturally to their chosen sides, Jane barely questioning what Maura was doing there.
The third time was on a bare mattress on Jane's living room floor. Maura had insisted on putting down a sheet but Jane had grumbled about not wanting to move, and then she'd conveniently draped herself across Maura so she couldn't move either. Maura was able to snag a rug from the couch so the parts of her body not covered in Jane weren't cold. At some point she rolled away, and Jane possessively reached out with her left arm and snagged her, pulled Maura back against her with her dominant hand, with a contented little sigh, and this wasn't what Maura had intended, when she lay down next to Jane for the first time, but she wasn't disappointed with where they were now. Maura on the left, Jane on the right, so they could lend the strongest parts of themselves to each other.
