Chapter Text
Maybe it was the closed curtains, the sound of the snow lightly tapping on the windows, or just the tiredness of it all. When Sage opened her eyes, the clock on her wall indicated that she had slept until close to noon. The empty space in her bed was what made her eyes stop weighing her down, as if a wicked, horrible dream had awakened her. She felt her heart racing, searching the room for any sign that Dorothea's presence last night had been real. She had had vivid dreams a few times before, it was always a horror to face the world where Dorothea was not around.
But there she was, sitting in a chair in the corner of her room. She was staring at the bed in a rather frightening way, lost in what seemed to be too many thoughts. All tucked in, wearing a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt that Sage was sure was lying on top of the chair, and turquoise underwear, Dorothea looked smaller but very real. The woman in the bed had a hard time calming her heart, had to gather some courage to face all the electricity from last night, which in the morning looked like just a bunch of wires tangled in a complicated way. They would need courage.
"Hey. Is everything okay?" She said quietly, but still seemed to have startled the brown-haired woman. She was somewhere else. Not in that room, not in that small town. She was somewhere else.
"Hey, hi. It's...fine. I'm sorry I left you there. I got a call a few minutes ago and I didn't want the sound to bother you, but I couldn't... come back."
"Come back now then, I'll help you. Do you want to tell me what the call was about?"
As if she had only heard the first part, Dorothea crawled into bed and got under the covers next to Sage. When they looked into each other's eyes, Dorothea's were with the pain she brought to town, the pain that was also in Sage. She would not try to smile, for she would be found out, she would be taken apart in her fragile structure. She leaned forward a little and kissed her favorite freckles, her eyes closed. Sage stole a kiss on the lips and she returned it immediately.
"Can you tell me more about your life, Sage?"
Sage hesitated, looking at the attentive and now open eyes right in front of hers. She didn't want to let Dorothea get away from difficult and important conversations, but she also didn't want to make things heavy so early. She decided to answer, decided to say yes like she always did.
"Well... yeah, my life is kind of exactly as planned. I bake bread, I make songs and play them on my guitar, sometimes on the keyboard. I created a whole musical once, using my songs, but I hardly ever show it to anyone. I participate in festivals in town sometimes, playing or exhibiting things from the bakery with my mom. I spend time with my friends, especially Betty. We went to art college together, and then she opened a second-hand book, record and painting sale that's right next to a flower shop, they even opened up one of the walls to give each other access. I like to spend time there and help with the books and the flowers. And that's... all."
Sage sighed, slowly stroking Dorothea's hair, trying to say more with her eyes than she could with words. She wished she hadn't said the word's "that's all" at the end of it all, and she wished she hadn't sounded as if these little things weren't her whole world, her whole life. She could never say how it was part of her routine to think about Dorothea, to watch her movies and buy products she sold, to stop at the newsstand to read magazines with her face on the cover. How she wanted Dorothea to be part of her quiet days, but how genuinely happy she was in them, just as she expected the actress to be happy in her busy days.
Dorothea was beginning to lose sight of everything. Why she left, why she came back, why they could never be together. That was always the feeling that took hold of them ten years ago, when they approached what they called a tie. It always seemed so much bigger than they were, always stronger than anything they did. But they weren't sure if they had done anything but think about it, they really weren't sure how they knew they weren't strong enough to subvert the forces of the tie.
"Stop thinking those things, Dora." Sage whispered, and pushed her forehead against the one in front of her, trying not to let her look like everything was wrong, like she was about to leave again. "Listen, I know you're going back to LA. You came for Christmas. I don't know if you planned to end up in my bed but either way, I'm not going to wait or ask you to stay. I didn't do that the first time, did I?"
"No. You didn't. I just really should have... thought it through. Of course I'd rethink my whole life if I saw you."
"Well, you don't have to do that, okay? I get it. Just, I don't know, try to see it as a casual fling." They both felt a sharp stab in their chests, but didn't want to show it. "It doesn't have to be... something that big."
"What if it's something that big? How will we know we're not letting something huge go?" Dorothea held Sage's face with both hands, slowly getting to her knees on the bed, a growing desperation. She had the look she wore when she wanted to turn the world upside down, when she wanted to reverse the rotation of the earth. Sage had a growing bad feeling about all this, about the point of no return they had reached. It had taken her years to understand things as they are, to resign herself to the circumstances of life. Dorothea was right there trying to open the wound again. "When I tell you that during these ten years I have never loved anyone as I love you, and I hear you say the same, it makes me furious how we are still willing to leave it all behind. Why would we accept such an injustice, Sage? Why is it that we never fight hard enough, don't tolerate some things and adjust others?"
"Well, why did you wait ten years to tell me that? I never stopped waiting for you to come and tell me that, I didn't close the door on you for once. There were many Christmases, you know? It's not fair to talk about this situation as something that just formed without us being able to do anything about it. We could have. I could have asked you to stay, I could have gone with you, you could have stayed here or asked me to go with you. We just didn't do it, we didn't send any reminders in all that time. We were afraid of something too big and we didn't even know what that something was. I... I don't know how not to believe now that this something won't wreck us."
Dorothea pulled away a little, removed her hands from Sage's face. She was good at holding back tears when she needed to, good at running away sometimes. She did neither, not in the face of the realization that the bed she was in now was the warmest she had ever known, that the universe Sage Veershore lived in was so warm and welcoming. For the first time in years she felt she could cry enough, that her tears would be finite this time. The tornadoes and hurricanes would pass, and she would stay. Sage touched her face and met her wet eyes again, with the kindest look she had ever seen.
"I love you so much, Dora. We've built this hell together and the only way we're going to get out of it is by having horrible conversations, telling the truth. You've got to trust me, babe. You have to tell me what you want, what you really want, and we'll deal with it. Wherever it takes us."
"What if we come to the conclusion that this is it? That we can't be together without abandoning each other completely, by some evil force of fate?"
"Well, then it won't be the first time. You'll already know what to do. The other way is more complicated."
Dorothea smiled truthfully between tears, and let her head fall with all its weight on Sage's shoulder. Her heart was the heaviest thing. She felt it would be harder than leaving. So she got out of bed, overthinking things and wiping away the tears that had remained. She would try not to be nervous, try not to run away. The waiting seemed so hard, but she felt like she would break if she spoke now, felt like she wouldn't make it through the rest of the day. Sage watched her movements, sitting up. She was glad to see her, finally without the intermediation of a screen.
"My family must be thinking I've gotten into some kind of trouble. What are you doing later, Sage?"
"Well, at the Christmas dinner? I always spend Christmas with my mom and my aunts, at her house. It's a pretty quiet Christmas, actually, just made up of women who have gray hair and knit gifts. You should come over."
"Right, can we... Mm, can we talk sometime before midnight, but not now?"
"I don't even wanna know what you turn into at midnight."
Dorothea just smiled as she put her black dress back on. She had suddenly gotten a headache, a feeling of being trapped inside herself. She was fighting with all her might not to fall immediately into the warm bed. Somehow, Sage understood the internal struggle and had found in silence and resignation a desperate act of love. She prepared herself to love Dorothea even more when she left her, to be grateful for the time they had lived and move on. If the two of them had only talked, they would have realized right there how much they were trying all the time to make each other's lives easier, and they were doing so by not being honest with themselves.
Sage was unable to carry out her heroic plans to see Dorothea leave because she had to drop her off at home, and then go to her mother's house. The parting was curious, they said no words, as if they were saving them for later. Of course, the words bubbled up all day long. While hanging Christmas decorations, occasionally looking at the window, preparing something for dinner. The damned season was right there, and they were closer than they'd been in years, but insisted on bravely enduring the distance.
At eight o'clock in the evening, Sage sat up in her old bed and stared at her reflection in the mirror, checking the time in the reflection of the clock that stood right above her bed. She had checked her phone more times than expected, and there was no news from Dorothea, no messages. Two of Cassandra's sisters hadn't arrived yet, dinner was ready, so all she had to do was stare at her own reflection. The red lipstick, the red hair with whitish strands, the green sweater that was already on its third consecutive Christmas and the black pants. At some point, she began to have the feeling that she was looking at a young Sage, who had grown up in that room experiencing so many different loves, most of them for Dorothea. In an act of love for this young Sage, she sent a message.
“ Hey Dorothea, do you ever stop and think about me?”
By 9:30 p.m., the message still hadn't been answered, and all the aunts had arrived and were chatting about anything in town. They had the same habit of squeezing their noses and eyes while squeezing the cheeks of Sage, who had once been a freckled and cheeky child. That day it was a little more intense, as they noticed their niece more distant, sometimes frowning when she forgot to pay attention to her body language. At one point, her aunt Cresta, the bold one, looked right into her eyes at the dinner table.
"What's the matter with you, my pretty little girl? Are you suffering from love right at the Christmas season?"
The fright was impossible to disguise, and the way she was disconcerted didn't help either. She met the eyes of Cassandra, across the table, who seemed at peace. She understood everything. She realized that her aunts and her mother had seen her with this look at another time, 10 years ago, when she had entered an inexplicable cycle of longing for herself and others. She would have panicked if she were that age, but not anymore. She looked back at her Aunt Cresta.
"Well, I guess... yeah, it is. I'm sorry about that."
"Why, my sweet darling, there's no need to apologize! You can tell us anything that is in your heart." Aunt Lucinda said gently, as she always did. Aunt Cresta nodded, rubbing one palm against the other before squeezing Sage's cheeks again.
"Besides, we love a good gossip, as you may well know. And you never tell us about your sweethearts, so we'll forever be treating you like our little girl. You don't want that, do you?"
Sage smiled politely, trying to communicate by telepathy with her mother, who watched her with her hands under her chin, nodding and encouraging. The day of her revolution had come, right on Christmas (Happy Birthday, Jesus). She took her aunt's hands from her cheeks.
"Well, uh... Mom, Aunt Cresta, Aunt Sarah and Aunt Lucinda. There's something you should know about me..."
But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
Suddenly, all eyes went beyond her, a little surprised, confused and curious, like someone following the next scene of a soap opera. She knew that look, knew well who caused it. The queen selling dreams. Sage turned around.
"Sage, Aunt Cass... Good night and Merry Christmas. I apologize a thousand times for coming in like this, it was snowing so hard, and I found myself driven by habit to look for the key inside the third vase and come in. I just..."
"Miss Dorothea, it's all right. We were just about to talk about you. Is there anything you need to say? These are my sisters, by the way." Cassandra smiled, still with her hands beneath her chin, an eerie calm of someone who had spent years waiting for the right time.
Sage glanced down at the table the instant her aunts looked at her older sister, and then back at Dorothea, slowly understanding the situation. The red-haired woman felt her whole face burn, but she felt completely disarmed by how small Dorothea looked in the middle of the dining room, holding one of her arms, her breathing a little out of rhythm.
"Hmm, right. I'll just... say what I need to say. Get me out of here if it's a terrible mistake, Sage. I was just about to go back to LA without telling you, out of some... pathetic malfunction in my heart that won't let me face important things with the courage they deserve. And then I couldn't. I couldn't leave town. And the whole time I was thinking that... I love acting, Sagie. I know it must sound like I hate it, but it's been my favorite thing to do since I was little. I devote myself to my characters like they're my whole life, and they are. But all the things around it keep pulling me into some kind of black hole. I'm still not successful enough to protect myself from some things. I need to accept roles I don't want, or play a dirty game in order to get the ones I want, or to recover my image afterwards. I've been at it since I was seventeen, I understand how they work. It's just... It gets kind of automatic sometimes. I don't talk to anyone very honestly. People already know everything about me anyway, or think they do. I take people home. I spend my money on institutions or anything that makes me feel like it's all worth it. Anything they say I need at the moment. I can't even remember the last time I went to the supermarket, people do everything for me. My moments of most genuine joy are in front of cameras. And yet, I miss you so, so much, you wouldn't believe how much. God. Not even my favorite thing can fill your space."
Dorothea was crying now, and moved as slowly as she could near Sage, to kneel beside her and take her hand. Sage hadn't realized that she was now looking into her eyes so closely, that they were being watched by four middle-aged women who somehow seemed to be alone. Dorothea was crying, and it was different from all the times Sage had seen her cry on television. She was there, whole.
"I just need you to know that I was happier this weekend than I have been in years. Even when we seemed immersed in pain and confusion, I was truly happy. And you're right, you were right about everything, there were too many Christmases and I wasn't brave enough. I just won't endure another one of those without you, not without knowing I tried. It's unfair to take the loss without even starting the game. Right?" Dorothea kissed one of Sage's hands at a time, and looked at her again with the familiar determined, longing look. "So, here's a crazy idea, I'll just say it once: I've been talking to some folks in New York, I've been invited to be part of a musical. It's still under construction, there are still songs to close the gaps in the script, but for now it's about two girls who end up accidentally turning the small town upside down by trying to go to graduation together. I thought about turning it down, it seemed too personal and too painful, but I realized that this is what I've always wanted. I also realized that I never asked you to come with me anywhere, and I've always resented that you didn't ask me to stay. So, yeah, I'm asking you to come with me to New York, Sage. You don't have to stay there forever, not even more than a week. You can be my girl from Tupelo, I'll come see you as often as you want me to. It's not that easy, there will be giant cameras in your face as soon as you leave the house, I don't know how you feel about that, but I want you to be the one building this story with me. What I'm saying is that I'm willing to try... if you are too, I..."
"Dora, Dora... Aunties, mom, I beg your pardon. Close your eyes if you want, okay? I just really need to kiss her."
Sage closed her own water-filled eyes and kissed Dorothea, just as she would have liked to for the last 15 minutes and the last 10 years. For all the times she had resigned herself to the conditions of the present and for all the times she had not questioned. For Dorothea's courage, for her patience. Because for the first time they were being honest and realizing that they were young and their lives were not doomed not to converge. They would find common ground if they so wished, if they were brave. No tie without starting the game.
"Is that a yes?"
"Of course it is, Dora. Yes, yes, yes."
"Wow, does she look exactly like in the movie! What a thrill!" Aunt Cresta clapped her hands, unable to remain calm for so long. It was only from this disruption that Dorothea stood up, and Sage looked back down at the table, her face burning red. She hadn't exactly planned to kiss a famous actress and her high school sweetheart on Christmas Eve in front of her mother and three middle-aged aunts, but they looked fine, quite smiley.
"I think she told it better than you could, dear." Cassandra smiled emotionally, "You don't know how painful it was for me to leave you feeling all alone the first time you told me, just because I didn't know what to do. I hope I did the right thing this time."
Sage stood up to hug her mother, feeling like a different person than she had before, but somehow the same girl her mother had watched grow up in that house. Dorothea had, at last, inspired her revolutions of pride. Her love and her truth had left the room, and had found somewhere to be, proudly. Dorothea ended up having to stay for dinner, after calling her mother and explaining much of the situation, and Sage nearly died of embarrassment at the sight of her aunts, even shy Aunt Sarah, trying to pry fresh Hollywood gossip and dirt on their favorite actors out of her, as well as stories from their teenage years.
It was only after much time and details drawn from the actress that they were able to meet in Sage's old room, with a playful warning from Cassandra to leave the door open, something she declared she had never had the chance to say but had always been willing to. The two women laughed as they closed the door slowly, and then laughed even harder when they made a noise as they leaned against it, invalidating the whole effort. But they were kissing and kissing again, as they had dreamed for so many years. Nothing else hovered menacingly above them and the noise was only the beating of their hearts. They felt brave.
"Are you afraid?" Dorothea whispered, looking into Sage's eyes and then at the freckles around her eyes as she always did.
"I was afraid you wouldn't show up. I can handle the rest."
The actress slowly ran her eyes over Sage's room with a look of recognition and love. She observed the walls, the bed, the window and the movie posters. She had been there so many times, had slept and woken up in that room more times than she could remember. After so much, it must have been surprised to see her. Still there. She told the room, Sage and herself how she needed to get back to L.A. the next day to take care of some unfinished business and how she intended for them to go to New York for New Year's Eve. How they would have some quiet days to adjust at first. How she would like Sage to accompany her to the production meetings of the musical, how she would like her to be part of it, if she liked the idea. How she was still afraid of failing at what she loved to do, and how she was even more afraid of losing Sage over some stupid miscommunication. But it made all the difference to be telling, it made more difference than either of them could imagine.
Now they were even indeed, facing a tie that looked warm. Right there, in the small town Dorothea's heart had taken her to, even in the presence of the "damn season". Yes, now they could call it even.