A/N - "Guest chapter 10 - Quick question. Why doesn't emily say I love you when paige says it."
Thanks, Guest! That's a good point. Emily should say it. I'll be more aware about that in future chapters. I appreciate this feedback!
Paige lay awake in the guest room, staring at the ceiling with the faint noises from the TV in Emily's parents' bedroom leaking through the wall. She was trying to will herself to sleep: I can do this! I can do this! She was ecstatic when she heard the door being eased open and saw Emily tiptoe in. She almost let out a cheer at the sight, but Emily had a finger on her lips in a shushing gesture.
"Yay," Paige whispered, "I knew that you'd come and cuddle with me!"
"Cuddle with you my ass!" Emily shot back. "Show me your boob!"
Paige laughed. She should've known. She obediently pulled off the Penguins jersey that she was wearing on top of a pair of yoga pants. Emily's mouth and eyes widened in anticipation. The look on her face eased Paige's nerves. This may have been about the piercing, but, still, Paige was about bare herself to her girlfriend for the first time, and she couldn't help fearing rejection. She had, as it turned out, nothing to worry about.
At first, Emily was distracted by the sheer beauty that was newly unveiled before her. When she caught sight of the heart that was bisecting her girlfriend's nipple, her original purpose was renewed. She stared at the tiny platinum object with the intensity and focus of a forensic scientist. Her hands began orbiting the region, hesitant to make first contact. Paige, seeing the conflict in Emily's eyes, let out a long sigh and resignedly nodded her head. Emily took the cue and went in for the kill. She was absolutely obsessed: lifting it, sliding it, testing its weight. Paige knew how the mama dogs in those viral videos feel, lying passively as their pups irreverently help themselves to the maternal milk stations.
"When did you get it?" Emily asked, her attention and her fingers having subconsciously shifted from the piercing to the breast itself. Paige explained that she had made a bet with her swim team: If they rallied and beat their crosstown rivals, she would get a tattoo. The last thing that Paige wanted was a tattoo, but, as captain of the team, she was looking for a way to motivate her team. They hadn't beaten their rivals in 16 years and were heavy underdogs going into the meet, so it looked to be a safe bet. It turned out to be a powerful motivator. After her team won, they paraded her to a seedy tattoo parlor in a questionable part of town, where visions of hepatitis danced in her head. She noticed the heart in a display case in the front of the store that housed the usual assortment of studs, hoops, and bars. The heart and arrow resonated with her. The man whom she fell in love with (at the time, she never thought that it would be anything except a man) would, one day, capture her heart, and, when he did, that would be the surprise that she had in store for him. She managed to convince her teammates to allow her to substitute a piercing for a tattoo. "You made the right choice," Emily affirmed. "I mean, a tattoo would be hot, but this!"
Paige was finding it hard to breathe, much less talk, under the attention that Emily was lavishing on her breasts. Things only got worse as her nipples grew erect. Paige stifled a moan and had to pull Emily's hands away from the area. She was getting too worked up, and she was not about to have her first time take place there, sneaking around from her girllfriend's parents as they watched TV in the room next door.
Paige didn't hear the alarm on Emily's phone when it went off at 4:45. She only felt Emily's body pull away from her, and, in her sleep, she pulled Emily back in tight. "Paige," Emily whispered in her ear, "let me go! I have to get back to my room before my Dad wakes up!" Lieutenant Colonel Fields was up at 5:00 every morning. There was no such thing as a day off. Paige sprang to life at the mention of Emily's father. Emily gave her a quick kiss and kissed her piercing. She tossed Paige her Penguins jersey: "You can put this back on, now."
Emily's thoughts were consumed by the piercing for the rest of the day. She kept making subtle references to it. She must have used the word "heart" a hundred times: getting to the heart of the matter; in her heart, she loved Stanford; she didn't have the heart to take the last bag of peanuts on the airplane. Each time, she paused at the word "heart," just in case there was any chance that Paige might miss the reference. While they were eating dinner, she told her parents how she and Paige had gotten together. They were an unlikely couple, she admitted, "But you never know where Cupid's arrow will strike," she said, clearing her throat at the end of that utterance to get Paige's attention. "You've got a little something right there, Hon," she said, swiping with a napkin at her own left breast, to point out the spot that Paige needed to check. Paige looked down for an instant before she realized what Emily was up to, then just rolled her eyes in frustration as Emily stifled a laugh and her parents looked on in amused misunderstanding. They assumed that Emily was teasing Paige about Cupid's arrow. The literalness of the arrow in question would never in a million years have occurred to them.
Despite all of the teasing, Paige really enjoyed the dinner. She had never smiled so much in the company of people her father's age. She just kept looking back and forth between Wayne and Pam Fields, reveling in the way that they interacted with each other. As endearing as it was, it made Paige feel a bit sad. She was looking in on a world that she never knew existed, except on TV, and she realized what she had been cheated out of. Emily picked up on her melancholia and squeezed her hand, giving her a sad smile and a kiss of reassurance on the cheek. Paige did her best to smile.
After dinner, Paige and Emily offered to clean up as Wayne retrieved all of the Christmas decorations from the attic and Pam got them organized in the living room for the next day's all-out blitz of decking the halls. To most families, Black Friday meant shopping. To Emily's family, it meant decorating.
Once the kitchen was cleaned, Emily took Paige for a stroll through Rosewood. She walked with her arms linked around Paige's arm, and they took their time window shopping on Main Street and taking in one or two of the nature trails. It was a crisp late-Autumn day, and Emily had been hoping for an early snow. As she told Paige, Rosewood just looks more peaceful under a blanket of snow. Paige couldn't stop herself from kissing her. She loved the way that Emily looked at the world and saw beauty.
Emily and Paige begged off the morning shift of decorating so that they could spend some time with Emily's friends. They decided to meet at The Brew, where Emily had worked during the last two years of high school, so that Emily could show Paige off to her co-workers as well.
When Hanna saw her, she clasped her hands over her heart and tilted her head, with an expression on her face as though she were about to cry. She gave Paige a warm hug, "Aw, you're so adorably sweet!" she said, almost whimpering. Paige, realizing that Hanna must have heard the story behind her choice of a heart, glared wearily at Emily, her eyes saying, "Do you have to tell her everything?"
Aria cut in on the hug and introduced herself. She gave Paige a much more socially appropriate embrace before pointing to Hanna and asking, "Do I really want to know what that was all about?" Emily snatched Paige by the arm into safety and answered for her. "No, Aria." She followed up with a whisper, "Not right now, at least." Paige rolled her eyes at the thought that her boobs would once again be the topic of conversation among Emily and her friends. Spencer rolled her eyes, too, and greeted Paige with a hug of understanding.
At first, Paige thought that Aria's heart-and-crossbones sweater was another dig by one of Emily's friends about the piercing, but Emily explained later that there was no rhyme or reason to Aria's wardrobe choices. Emily hadn't told anyone except Hanna, and she was sure that Hanna hadn't told the other two.
Paige settled into a comfort zone over coffee with Emily's friends. As Emily had told both her and Spencer, they were actually a lot alike. "In a different reality, I could have called you 'friend'" Paige quoted.
"Star Trek, 'Balance of Terror!'" Spencer exclaimed without hesitation.
"Geek test!" Hanna shouted, "Busted!"
As they drank their brews and chatted, Aria looked up toward the opening door and nodded subtly to Emily. Picking up on that, the rest of the table not-so-subtly turned their attention to the door, where Maya was entering. She waved and headed over to the table, a smile on her face. "Hello, ladies!" she said warmly. She was standing behind Emily and Paige with a hand resting casually on each girl's shoulder. She squeezed Emily's shoulder lightly. "I see that it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas over at your house, Emily. Have you warned Paige what she's in for?" Emily lowered her head, shaking it "no" with a smile. Maya turned to Paige, who was smiling nervously up at her, and mouthed the word "Run!" Paige pretended to get up to flee, and Emily halted her with a hand to her thigh. Maya greeted the rest of table before she excused herself. "Well, I don't want to interrupt! I just wanted to say hello. Have a great day, ladies!"
"That was... Wow," Spencer said once Maya had moved out of earshot.
"Right?" Hanna agreed.
"You guys seem to get along better now that you're broken up than you ever did when you were together," Aria offered.
"Yeah. What does that say about our relationship?" Looking over at Paige, Emily added in a hushed voice, "Are you okay?"
Paige smiled brightly and replied loud enough for everyone to hear, "That was a whole lot more comfortable than my first time meeting her!"
Decorating at Emily's house was a well-choreographed production, undertaken with clockwork-precision. Paige was intimidated by it all, afraid that one misstep or misplacement on her part would gum up the entire works. She looked to Emily for reassurance but found none. She had never seen Emily this sober and focused outside of the pool. Paige felt great relief when, late into the night, everything was finally in place and lit up. She was half expecting a production crew from the "Crazy Christmas Lights" reality program to show up. She had to admit that the final product worth it. The smile on Emily's face as she hugged Paige was definitely worth it.
"Mom," Emily begged, "is it okay if Paige and I sleep in front of the tree tonight?" Emily asked as if it were a ritual. Her mom pretended to think it over, weighing the pros and cons, before she gave in. "Well..." she said, drawing out the word, "I think that'll be all right, don't you, Wayne?"
"I suppose that we could allow that!" Emily thanked them both with a hug and kiss, the smile still stretched wide across her face.
As they headed upstairs to get ready for bed, Paige expressed her surprise that Emily's parents were okay with them sleeping in the same room. "It's the living room, Paige. I don't think that they're worried that you're going to maul me right out here in the open!"
Paige shook her head. "Oh, I'm not the one whom your parents need to be worried about!"
"Paige, please!" Emily was mock-serious, dropping her voice a couple of octaves. "It's the Christmas tree! Some things are sacred!"
Paige got back to the tree before Emily did and rolled out the sleeping bags that had conveniently been placed there during the decorating phase. Not as if sleeping by the tree had been the plan all along, Paige laughed to herself.
Paige laughed out loud when Emily showed up wearing her Santa-red flannel footie pajamas, with puffy white accents on the sleeves and at the rear end. "Do they even make those in adult sizes?" she wondered out loud.
"Watch what you say, McCullers," Emily replied, "or it's going to be a long, cold, lonely night in the guest bedroom for you!" Emily dragged her "Elf" sleeping bag, featuring Will Farrell's picture, closer to the "Frosty" one that Paige had settled into. She climbed inside and backed up into Paige's sleeping bag. Paige sighed contentedly and reached out an arm to wrap around Emily's cocoon. Emily had converted her: She officially loved Christmas.
Everybody was up and at it bright and early Saturday morning. They piled into Wayne's Cherokee and headed off to the orchards outside of town to pick up some pumpkins. Paige was flabbergasted to learn that Emily's family had never carved pumpkins. She was resolved not only to carve them but to bake their innards into pumpkin pie.
Paige expertly guided them to just the right pumpkins and, using templates from the internet and skills that she had learned from Pru, a veritable surgeon with a carving knife, sliced artistic designs into the pumpkins' faces.
The pies themselves proved to be more of a challenge. Paige did well as Pru's sous-chef, but when she was the one in charge of the kitchen, with the Emily as sous-chef, it was quite a different story. As much as possible, she blamed her ineptitude on Emily's lacking skills as an assistant. By the time the last pie was in the oven, the entire kitchen was a disaster area. No one complained about the final product, though.
Later that evening, Hanna stopped by to see her friend one last time before the girls headed back to Stanford. The three of them chatted and laughed over pie and coffee. It was starting to get late, and Paige and Emily had an early flight. Before Emily could subtly usher her guest out of the house, Hanna burst out, "Show me Paige's room!"
"Hanna, you've seen our guest room before!"
"I know, but I just want to get the whole 'Paige' experience. You don't really know a girl till you know what kind of luggage she rolls with."
Emily realized that she would never get Hanna to leave unless she acquiesced, so they all headed up to the guest room. They stood there for a few moments in awkward silence before Emily started in on her speech about how lovely it was to see Hanna, but they really needed to get some sleep.
Hanna looked angry. "I don't believe this!"
Emily looked over to Paige, both of them confused. "Don't believe what?"
"Are you serious right now?"
"What?" Emily and Paige said in unison.
"Are you seriously just going to fly back to California without letting me see Paige's boob ornament?" As Emily hurried her down the stairs and out of the door, Hanna protested, "What? You got to see it, Emily!"
"She's my girlfriend, Hanna!"
"So? Paige doesn't mind! You don't mind, right, Paige?" she called over her shoulder.
Paige had to laugh. Hanna actually thought that she was within her rights to expect an audience with Paige's nipple. "I love you, Hanna, but that's never going to happen."
"Are you wearing it right now? At least tell me that! Do you have it on right now?"
When Emily finally got her to the front door, Hanna tried one last ploy. She hugged Emily and whispered into her ear, "Take a picture and text it to me! I won't tell!"
Sunday morning, Paige steeled herself for another all-day air-travel ordeal. Emily helpfully, and repeatedly, checked Paige's boobs, to ensure that there would be no repeat of the delay at Security that Paige had on the outbound flight. Even after they'd cleared Security, Emily was eager to give Paige a pat down. Of course, she checked both breasts, because one can't be too careful. Paige was in a much cheerier mood traveling back to Stanford than she had been on the trip out to Rosewood.