Boston Marriage (Part Two)
Title: Boston Marriage
Author: politicette, themistoklis
Fandom: Fake News: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report
Characters/Pairings: cis!girls "Stephanie" Colbert/Joan Stewart (genderbended from "Stephen" Colbert, Jon Stewart), assorted "Colbert" family members, assorted original characters
Rating: R
Length: ~26,300 words
Warnings: TRIGGER WARNINGS for domestic violence, homophobia, alcohol use
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Notes: Thank you so much to paperscribe for betaing this piece for us. We started it so long ago we legitimately do not remember most of the first half, but apparently it's in okay shape.
Summary: Joan and "Stephanie" run away from home to get married, and it's going to be totally awesome.
Part One
Joan flops down on the bed the second they get back and doesn't open her eyes while Stephanie slips her shoes off, puts her purse up. She can hear Stephanie moving around the room, and she keeps her eyes closed, trying not to picture the scene in the Colbert's kitchen, hoping that Stephanie will keep not noticing how long it took for anyone to ask where she was.
She doesn't look up until she hears Stephanie giggling.
[GEORGE ARDEN] ":-D hey girl"
The mattress sinks next to Joan as Stephanie eases down, resting her head against the pillow. Joan wriggles up just enough so she can see her typing.
[me] "hey :-D"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "how r u? & how is ur lovely gf?"
Joan rolls her eyes, and Stephanie elbows her for reading over her shoulder.
She smiles. [me] "still lovely. i'm okay. you?"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "that's good. i'm v bored in the back of a calculus lecture"
"I woulda thought for sure he was a dropout," Joan whispers, her breath tickling Stephanie's ear, and Stephanie muffles her giggles with the back of her hand.
[me] "in the summer???"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "trying to make room in sched for a minor"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "and the perils of double-majoring"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "also the professor is hot"
[me] "that's disgusting tbh"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "hey, calm down the prof. is a guy"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "it's not a sexist thing."
[GEORGE ARDEN] "dude works out"
Joan snorts while Stephanie puzzles over students taking classes because of what the professor looks like. She prods Stephanie a little and takes the phone over, while Stephanie curls up against her side.
This interlude is more than welcome (even if it is George). Joan isn't looking forward to Colbert-family wedding talk.
[me] "it's joan. what're the good neighborhoods here. apartment-shopping later"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "hey, lovely gf ;-) the best neighborhood around here is mine, obviously. there are a couple of places up in the building down the road if you want"
"Hell no," Joan mutters, at the same time Stephanie says, "Aw."
They look at each other for a moment, the phone resting in Joan's palm. Then Stephanie lunges.
Joan sticks her hands in the air while Stephanie tries to grab the phone back. It means she can only keep herself on the bed with one hand, and Stephanie doesn't seem to care if getting the phone back means knocking Joan to the carpet, but Joan is pretty sure they should talk about this first.
"There's no harm in just looking," Stephanie protests.
"Yes, there is. You'll fall in love with a breakfast nook or something and then I'll be stuck living next to motorcycle guy."
"So what? The motorcycle guy is nice!"
"We've only known him for a few days! He could be a serial killer!"
Stephanie looks at Joan and raises one dark eyebrow.
"He's not a serial killer," she says, coaxing the phone out of Joan's hands. "His roommates are too nice to live with a serial killer. Besides, I'd like to live on the same block with some friends. Wouldn't you?"
Joan hesitates. Thinks about shared dinners and maybe watching Lord of the Rings movies with someone who named his pet from the series. Hanging out with Tina, who curses as much at the news as she does. "Yeah," she says, slowly.
Stephanie sits up with her legs crossed underneath her, and Joan debates sliding off the mattress onto the floor before crawling around to kneel behind her and watch her type. She steadies herself with her hands on Stephanie's shoulders, and Stephanie absently pats her hand, typing with just five fingers.
[me] ":-) we'd love to see. when can we visit?"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "i'll have to check"
---
Joan's stomach hurts, but she tells Stephanie to go ahead and order food anyway. Then she sits on the bed with a pillow hugged to her stomach and tries to think of a way to talk Stephanie out of calling her mother back.
They'd gotten texts from Joan's mom the night they'd left. They hadn't gotten a single message from Stephanie's mother (or the rest of her family) for days.
And Stephanie hadn't talked about it, exactly, but Joan got the impression Mrs. Colbert never moved to stand between her daughter and her husband.
When Stephanie's done talking, she flops back on the bed. "I think I might paint my nails before the delivery boy gets here," she says, wiggling her toes. "What color do you think I should use?"
"Purple," Joan hazards, which makes Stephanie giggle. She rolls over onto her stomach and stretches out to fish in her makeup bag on the floor. Joan hesitates, then sets the pillow aside and shifts to her knees. The mattress tilts funny while she crawls across it, her fingers following the diamond pattern woven into the fabric. It takes forever before she's next to Stephanie, close enough to stop moving and brace herself on the bedding.
"Listen." Joan wets her lips. "I ... I think..."
Stephanie casts a look over her shoulder without raising up. "Not purple?"
"Because I thought maybe not," she continues hurriedly, steamrolling over Joan's attempts to speak. "It doesn't go with my dress for tomorrow, and anyways I'm not even sure it's a good shade for me. I'm more of an autumn, I think."
It was easier to ask Stephanie to marry her.
"I've got a good goldenrod here," Stephanie says. "Although I'll need a towel before I get started."
Glass clinks together and she wriggles backwards a bit, giving herself enough room to sit back up on the bed and flip around, so she's facing the headboard. Joan reaches out and takes the tiny bottles from her, curls her fingers around them, tugs them against her chest. Before Stephanie can do any more than frown, Joan takes a deep breath.
"I don't think you should call your mother back tonight," she blurts.
Stephanie blinks at her. "You think it's too late?"
Joan sighs. "No. I mean maybe. Maybe she just wouldn't want to hear from you."
"Joan," Stephanie says. Her fingers are curled tight against her palms. "She sent me a message."
"I just mean. I just." She wished Stephanie could see this herself. "If she knew why we came up here, maybe she wouldn't - maybe she wouldn't have sent you a message."
Both of Stephanie's eyebrows come down and Joan shuffles back. She sets the bottles of nail polish down and tries to sit in a way that doesn't make her feel like she's about to fall over. It doesn't really help.
Stephanie clambers off the bed and puts her hands on her hips. "My mother loves me," she says, two bright spots of color hovering in her cheeks. "Of course she wants to know where I am! The only reason she waited to ask - the only reason is because I stormed out," she snaps, thumping her open palm against her chest. "I left without saying anything. She was just waiting until she thought I would calm down. I bet she was worried I wouldn't answer her if she tried to call me right away."
"Stephi-" Joan wants to gather Stephanie up in her arms and rock her.
"That's why she left a message instead of calling. She wants to hear from me, Joan, she does!" Stephanie keeps her hand curled against her chest and takes a few deep breaths, wets her lip and draws her chin up. "She's going to be very excited when she gets the news."
Joan slips off the bed and reaches out to grab Stephanie's free hand, holding on as tight as she can. "Stephi, I don't want you to get hurt. You weren't - you weren't the one who was angry. You left to keep yourself safe," she says. She reaches out for Stephanie's other hand when Stephanie doesn't jerk back.
"I didn't call and I didn't leave a note. Not like you," she says, her voice shaking. "She might think I hate her. I have to call her back, Joan."
Joan raises Stephanie's knuckles to her lips. "She doesn't ... she doesn't accept you, Stephi."
"You'll see, Joan," Stephanie says. She kisses Joan's cheek and takes a deep breath. "You'll see."
---
Stephanie waits until that night to call her mother back.
She sits on the bed with her legs crossed underneath her and cups the phone to her ear. Joan's old soccer-team shirt wrinkles up on Stephanie's chest when she leans back, exposing a stripe of skin between it and the waistband of her pajama shorts. Joan left her clothes (and her towel) piled on a chair outside the bathroom door, so Stephanie figures she will be able to start winding down the conversation when Joan ducks out to grab them. Not that Joan wouldn't give her privacy for the call, if she asked. She just doesn't want to ask.
She twists a lock of hair around two of her fingers, waiting for the phone to stop ringing. Usually, someone picks it up after three.
It's just getting to the point when she's wondering whether to leave a message when she hears a slightly-breathless, "Hello?" from the other end of the line. "This is Mrs. Colbert."
"Hi!" Stephanie exclaims. She doesn't know why she should be, she's only talking to her mom, but she finds herself a little nervous.
South Carolina is quiet for a moment. "Where are you, Stephanie?" her mom asks. A door shuts behind her, and Stephanie pictures her sunk down in the chair in the kitchen, the one with the worn-through pillow on the seat.
"I'm safe, don't worry," Stephanie says. Her words tumble over each other in her hurry to make her mother understand. "I just wanted to see how you all were doing and also to tell you about something that's happening soon. Is Daddy home?"
"Not right now," her mother says. Stephanie relaxes, just a little, and then tenses up when she notices it. A daughter should be announcing her engagement to her parents face-to-face. "But what does safe mean? Are you with people?"
"Yes, Joan is here!" she assures, nodding emphatically. "I mean, she's not here right now, but she's with me. She's actually about what I have to talk to you about."
"Oh."
Stephanie twists and starts patting around the side table, looking for the wedding magazine. She wants to describe the bouquet she picked out, the shoes she's thinking of. "It's so exciting, Mama! I've got so much planning to do, and I'm, I'm really feeling overwhelmed, so I'm so glad you called. I don't think I could do this by myself."
"Stephanie, slow down. I can hardly understand you."
Her hand finds the corner of the magazine, and she tugs it into her lap without knocking too much of anything over. "Joan proposed!" she says, and she can't push the grin back, even if it does hurt the corners of her mouth. "I could use your help with the wedding. We really want to have it done by the time school starts, since we're both going to be so busy with classes, and I just can't make up my mind on anything."
The other end of the line is quiet so long that Stephanie pulls her phone away from her ear to check that the call is still connected.
"Mama?"
"I don't think you understand what you're doing, Stephanie," her mom says, quiet and thin.
Stephanie inhales. "That's why I called you, Mama."
"I'm glad you did," she says. "I think you need more time to think about ... things. Maybe you ought to come home for a while. You should be with your family."
She picks at the bottom of her shirt. "I'm making my family."
"Isn't this all fast? Don't you want to think about it some more?"
The hotel gave them a box of tissues with the logo embossed on the cardboard. There weren't many inside, but it was still on the end table from where Stephanie had taken it out earlier to do her nails (after the food came). She pulls it into her lap now and balls one up to dab at her nose with. It's cooler in Massachusetts than South Carolina. She thinks she might be coming down with a cold.
"Aren't you happy for me, Mama?"
"Oh," her mother says. "Stephanie. I just. You need to know what you're doing. You need to understand." She swallows. "Why don't you come home and talk?"
Stephanie holds the phone away from her mouth and blows a little into the tissue. She can hear the water for Joan's shower still running through the walls, and she thinks that after this a steamy bath is just what she needs to clear herself up.
"I think you should come visit us," she says. "I could meet you at the airport."
Her Mama sighs. "Your father's home," she murmurs. "I have to go. Think about it, Stephanie."
"Let me know if you have a free weekend. Goodbye, Mama."
"Goodbye."
Stephanie plugs her phone in to charge near the window and starts pinning her hair up. When Joan swings the bathroom door open to grab her towel and her clothes, Stephanie is waiting, her nightgown piled on top of Joan's things.
Joan's eyes always look bluer when her face is pink. "Hi," she says.
Smiling, Stephanie brushes a damp curl off of her forehead. "Do you mind keeping me company in the bath?"
A little grin tugs at the corner of Joan's mouth and she shuffles backwards, making room for Stephanie to walk past her. "There's a radio in here," Joan says.
"Mmm." Stephanie sits on the lip of the tub and lets the water run hot.
---
The building has apartments open on the top floor and the bottom, the latter of which Stephanie doesn't like even before George has ushered them through the door. The windows are too big, and the floors are too hard, and none of the doorways have actual doors except the one leading to the bathroom. Jonah thinks that's weird, too, so she and Joan manage to outvote George by an overwhelming majority on that one.
Joan and George discover a mutual hatred of side-by-side refrigerators, but that doesn't get Joan to stop rolling her eyes at him. Stephanie stands to the side and just smiles when Joan glances over at her to make sure Stephanie won't ask her to be nicer.
At her side, her purse is quiet. She didn't even bring her cell phone.
The landlady says that the elevator is broken (but that it will be fixed soon, which makes Joan's mouth slant), so they have to climb the stairs to get to the other unit. Stephanie walks between Joan and George, wishing she hadn't worn heels, and thinking she never would've painted the hallway this shade of green.
"If you move in and it's not working, I'm pretty sure George and I can get boxes up these stairs," Jonah says, thumping his hand against the wall. George sours a bit and Jonah smirks. "Oh, come on. You have got muscles in those skinny arms."
"Not for this many flights of stairs," George mutters.
Jonah holds the door open for them and the landlady starts chatting about square footage and the number of outlets.
"There aren't like, street parties every night or something, are there?" Joan asks.
Hands stuck in his pockets, George snorts. "My roommates would toss water on them if there were."
"I would not," Jonah says. George raises an eyebrow at him and he says, "Okay, it was only that once."
Stephanie stares at him and he blushes a dark pink. She can't picture him leaving his room with an uncreased collar, let alone tossing a bucket of water out the window.
"This guy was drunk," he explains, waving his hands. "And he bothered Deja on her way up."
Joan grins. "That's pretty awesome."
"I know, right? Jonah can lift like fifty pounds over his head," George says. Jonah starts to talk about how it's not really all that impressive, but their voices fade out as Stephanie gets adjusted to the warm light.
Walking to the center of the room, Stephanie can see almost the entire apartment. There's no door in the archway between the empty living room and the kitchen to her left, and the door leading to the bedroom on her right is open.
It's small. She can tell that they won't both be able to have desks, or both a couch and an armchair. She can see where Joan would sit, on the couch, bent over her laptop. There's shelves built between the windows, an entertainment center, and she can see where they would put cards from Joan's mother around the base of the television.
The landlady says they can paint if they repaint it white when they move out, and Stephanie can see buying paint and having Larry help them when he comes up for the wedding.
She doesn't know what her mother would send them. Or what colors her sister Lulu would recommend for the bathroom.
"Do you like it?" George asks, wandering over to her.
"I think it would look better in a pale yellow," she says, and he laughs.
He stops short of holding his hand out, but he does shuffle his feet in a way that Stephanie knows is supposed to be comforting. "You look sad," he murmurs, softly. "Are you okay?"
"You should come see the shower!" Joan yells.
"I'm fine," Stephanie says. Because she is. They're apartment-shopping. And she has a shower to look at now.
There's a window in the shower. It's thick glass, the bubbled kind that you can't really see through. All she can tell is that it's sunny outside. She could tell her mom not to bring her rain jacket when she bought the plane ticket - she wonders if there's anywhere in the city where you can have an outdoor wedding.
Joan's standing behind the glass door and turns to look at Stephanie when she comes through the door. "There's a window in the shower," she says, pointing at it. "Is that weird? I think that's weird. Why would you put a window in the shower?"
But renting a place is expensive, just for a day, and she would like to be able to decorate it however she wants. So maybe sunlight would be enough, in a place with windows.
George pokes his head in over Stephanie's shoulder. "There's no room to have more wall space for a window."
Jonah calls from further inside the living room, and Stephanie guesses he knows about these sorts of things. "The glass is special, though. Nobody can see in."
"It's weird," Joan says. She looks at Stephanie. "Do you like it?"
If they don't invite very many people, they could have the wedding here. If they keep the guest list down to the people most important to them.
"Yes," she says. She takes a breath. "It's perfect."
Joan writes a check for first and last month's rent, murmuring to Stephanie that all her hours working at the drive-in were totally worth it, now. Even though she had to wear that stupid uniform.
And no, she's not going to tell George what it looked like.
Stephanie smiles. She had liked that uniform.
---
"I called my mom last night," Stephanie says, as George brings the pizza to their table. Jonah had gone to work before they'd made it here. "So she knows about the wedding, now, and that we're safe."
The bread stick sours in Joan's mouth. She curls her hand around her drink and carefully raises it to her lips, absolutely not spilling any over herself or Stephanie, and keeps her eyes shut while she gulps down ice-cold ... something-carbonated. Eyes shut, hand tight around her glass.
On the other side of the booth, George sits down and starts rattling off stories about every time he's ever eaten at this place, which (from letting the words wash over her) Joan thinks is every meal he's had since moving into the apartment sophomore year of college. Plus a few extra while pulling all-nighters.
Some of the stories are even funny, like the time his (ex-)boyfriend threw a drink in his face and stormed out of the place, so Joan kind of hates to interrupt. She can't hold it back anymore than she can keep her eyes from cracking open, though.
"You shouldn't have called her," she says. George stops mid-sentence.
Stephanie's mouth tightens. "She's my mother, Joan."
Stabbing pizza with a plastic fork is not satisfying. "I don't want her to hurt you anymore," Joan says. She drags a mushroom off her slice.
"She's not going to."
Joan is vaguely aware that George is glancing around the restaurant more than Stephanie, who is staring at her and can't seem to blink at the same time. Her stomach is churning on the bread she inhaled to make up for the breakfast she missed, and the toppings she's picked off of her pizza, and it tightens up all around the edges because Stephanie is looking at her, not the people who might be looking at them, and at least that's something new and different and wonderfully fucking shiny for their new home in their new city.
"Yes, she is. She thinks this is wrong, Stephi. She thinks we're wrong. She thinks you're wrong."
The fabric on the booth benches is slippery, and Stephanie slides back easily - Joan has to hold on tight when she reaches out and grabs her wrists. "Please," she says, holding on tight enough that Stephanie's skin goes white. "Stephi."
Biting her lip, Stephanie leans forward until her forehead brushes Joan's. "She didn't say that."
"There are couches in the bathroom," George stammers.
Joan looks sideways to glare at him, and he slides down in his seat a little - but doesn't look away. "If you want some privacy," he adds, snatching up his glass to down most of it in a few gulps.
Holding onto Stephanie so tightly means that it's fairly easy for her to get dragged across the seat, and then she's on her feet and it's too late not to follow her girlfriend through the mess of tables and chairs into the back of the restaurant.
Stephanie gets inside before her and stops in front of a couch, but doesn't sit down. She wriggles her hand out of Joan's grip and turns around, wraps both her arms across her front. Her hair is falling in her eyes, and she blows at it, tosses her head in a way that makes the back of Joan's neck flush hot.
"Look-" Joan starts, looking over at the woman at the sink. "I-"
Stepping forward so her hair's falling into Joan's face, now, Stephanie stoops enough to put her eyes on level with Joan's and yells in the quiet near-whisper they'd had to develop for fights in the dark, Joan on Stephanie's floor in a sleeping bag, Stephanie's legs tangled with hers, and the Colberts just down the hallway.
"Stop it! Stop just, just acting like my family is evil. They're not, Joan. My mom contacted me because she loves me," she says, her eyes dark and shining behind her glasses. "She loves me and she wanted to know where I was, and just because she's not the same as your mom doesn't mean that you get to tell me I shouldn't talk to her!"
The hand dryer's still blasting as the woman walks out, the door swinging shut behind her, and as soon as she's gone Joan reaches up to touch the side of Stephanie's face.
"Stephi, babe, if you could've seen yourself when - when you came over that night," she says, taking a deep breath and shoving the nausea down as much as she can, "I thought you were going to ask me to take you to the hospital. You were so scared, and so--"
"That wasn't her!"
"It was your dad! Your dad hurt you and there is no goddamn reason--" Joan sees Stephanie's mouth go tight on the curse and nearly wishes she'd edited herself.
Nearly. "You weren't there, Joan, you didn't see it, he was just angry because I--"
"It was not your fault!"
Stephanie slaps her palms against Joan's shoulders and bunches Joan's shirt up in her fingers, making her stagger back a little. "You weren't there, Joan!" she snaps. "And you weren't on the phone with Mama last night! I'm still family, she said so."
Joan swallows and it hurts. "Did she say she was sorry, too?"
"There's nothing to say sorry for."
"Did she ask how you were? How you got here?" Joan takes Stephanie's hands in hers and kisses her knuckles, breathes out over her skin. "Did she ask where you were staying or what you were doing for money? Did she ask you anything?"
Stephanie shakes her head. "This is exactly why I didn't tell you I was calling her."
The bathroom is stuffy, and Joan is breathing through her teeth. Her hands ache and the nausea isn't going away no matter how many time she swallows, and Stephanie is starting to look at her with less anger than worry. "Is she coming to the wedding?"
Stephanie takes off her glasses and rubs her knuckles against her eyes. "I couldn't give her a date," she says.
"I don't--" Joan stops, and rubs her hands over her face. She might have to sit down on one of those couches if she can move past Stephanie to get to it. "I don't get how you can't see this. We had to hide from them, Stephi, just so you'd be safe. That's not how it's supposed to be."
"Maybe not," Stephanie says, "but people are supposed to stay married forever, too."
Mouth open, Joan takes a step backwards.
Stephanie stares at her for a minute and then put her glasses back on, latches onto herself. "Sorry," she whispers. She shakes her head. "But Joan, that's just it. Not everything is perfect the first time around. Sometimes people need time, to grow and to figure things out and to get used to change and--"
"I haven't heard from my dad since we moved," Joan hisses. "Sometimes people don't change."
"Not everyone is like your dad, Joan. Now, my parents may fight, and I know that they aren't perfect. But they would never just leave me! They're going to come around!"
"People don't come around! Your parents think that we're going to hell! Your dad hurts you, all the time. They're ... They're bad people!"
"They are not!" And Stephanie's voice cracks, just a little, just enough to make her face go dark red. She takes a step back like she was worried Joan was going to reach out and touch her. "You may hate your father, but that doesn't mean I have to hate mine!"
Joan gulps a few times, clenches her jaw. "I never said I hated him."
"Oh, Joan," Stephanie whispers, staring at her. "I wish you could see yourself."
She almost chokes. The back of her throat tastes sour and Joan hates it, hates it, shakes and turns around and storms forward to a sink, the bathroom walls going blurry around her, and she shovels water down her throat in cupped hands. She keeps going even when she swallows some wrong and starts coughing, keeps going when she splashes most of a few handfuls up her nose, keeps going when Stephanie walks over (Joan can just hear her heels clicking over the water) and wraps her arms around Joan from behind.
She's hot all over and her ears are ringing and she hates herself for wearing a dark shirt that day, because every time she looks down she expects to see a plaid school skirt and Mary-Janes instead of her faded jeans and old boots. She hates this. She's supposed to be the strong one now.
"I'm not like him," Stephanie says into her hair. She clenches her arms around Joan's water-sloshed stomach and kisses the shell of her ear. "I'm not going to leave you," she says. "Not ever, Joan. It's okay."
Joan holds onto the rim of the sink even after Stephanie reaches around her to turn the water off. Someone comes in and out behind them, quietly, and they just stand there until they're alone again. Joan raises her head to survey the damage and her stomach twists up all over again when she sees Stephanie's staring at her in the mirror.
She wipes the back of her hand across her eyes. Stephanie leans forward and kisses her cheek, softly, and Joan takes a breath. "I never thought you - did I make you think that I thought you were like him?"
"No," Stephanie says. She rubs her hand up and down Joan's arms. "I just wanted you to hear it."
They stand there and just breathe, and two more people come in and out behind them. Joan starts to feel like her stomach isn't warring its way out of her body and lets go of the sink, slowly, easing around to face Stephanie without pushing her off. Stephanie touches her hand to the side of Joan's face, her fingertips cool even though Joan's still dripping water, and now that Joan thinks about it she is really hot.
"Do you want to go home?" Stephanie asks, trailing her hand along Joan's skin. "The hotel? ...The apartment?"
"Nah," Joan says. She swallows. "I'm hungry. I just need. I just need to catch my breath."
"Okay."
Joan wraps her hands around her own shoulders. "Are you mad at me?"
Stephanie kisses her. "Yeah," she whispers. "But I love you."
"Love you too."
Smiling, Stephanie tugs her away from the sink. "I should probably go check on my purse."
Joan glances at the couches. "I'm going to sit here. For a minute," she says, and squeezes Stephanie's hand back before she leaves.
She braces herself on the arm of the couch before she sits down, and then she rests her elbows on her knees and stares at her boots. She breathes in and out, with her eyes shut, counting.
---
George is still sitting at the booth.
All right. She can work with this. Just, breathe. Keep breathing.
At the mouth of the hallway leading back to the bathroom, Stephanie smoothes down her clothes. Her hair had looked fine in the mirror, but rubbing at her eyes had smeared her make-up a little. Not much. If she was just with Joan, she would do a touch-up, but she thinks George will definitely not be there if she disappears into the bathroom again.
She slides sideways into her seat and carefully glances through her purse to make sure everything's still there (it is, of course, she knew it would be). Then she decides to eat Joan's pizza slice, because it's the same thing anyway, and she doesn't entirely mind that Joan picked all the mushrooms off already. She's hungry, still, underneath all the knots in her stomach, and she'd rather have mostly-fresh pizza than reheated pizza in a few hours at the hotel.
"So," George says, scratching the back of his neck. "Um. You okay?"
"I'm fine," Stephanie answers, automatically. She hesitates and decides it's pretty much true. As long as Joan is steady when she comes back to the table, at least. She smiles, a little, and cuts into her pizza. It's kind of warm. "Joan can be overprotective."
George wets his lips. "Look, it's none of my business, but..."
"No," Stephanie says, her shoulders tensing. She slides a mushroom off onto Joan's new plate for when she gets back. "It's not."
"I was going to say I'd be here if you wanted to talk," George says.
She feels color and heat come to her face. "Oh."
George grins, slow and lazy, the kind of grin that the rest of the cheerleading squad would have pushed her at. Then he pops the end of a bread stick in his mouth and mumbles, "No problem. How're you two liking your time in Boston?"
"It's been lovely," she says, because the important parts have been. "We just have a lot to do. Especially now that we've got furniture to buy for the apartment."
"Thrift stores," George says, nodding. "I got everything but my mattress from thrift stores. And I've only had a chair collapse on me once."
"Did you have to put it together yourself?" Joan asks, and Stephanie hopes George was too busy jumping to notice she did, too.
Smirking, Joan eases down into the booth. She stretches an arm along the back, behind Stephanie's shoulders, and folds her pizza in half to pick it up. George twists sideways in the booth and stretches his legs out along his seat, trying to look casual and failing miserably when, while raising his drink to his mouth, he spills ice down the front of his shirt.
Joan giggles.
"Oh," George says, his grin cutting. "Oh, lovely girlfriend."
"You shut up," Joan says, and Stephanie's pretty sure she kicks him under the table.
She looks okay. Only a little bit of the hair around her face is still wet, and you can hardly tell from looking that she had been crying, just a little. Not that Stephanie would say that to her face. She just reaches over, underneath the table, and slides her fingers through Joan's.
"So are you missing class for this?" Joan asks, squeezing Stephanie's hand. She bites into her pizza and raises an eyebrow at George. "Your professors today not hot?"
"Hey now," George says. "When you have to take a math class you could've exempted if your high school had offered the AP course, you can get back to me. In the meantime, I get to try to make it interesting."
"What are you majoring in?" Stephanie asks.
"And minoring?" Joan asks (but she's rolling her eyes).
"Environmental engineering, ecology, and art history. And art history is not useless," he adds, glaring at Joan. She closes her mouth and glances sideways at Stephanie. "You see references to old works of art everywhere. And it makes visiting museums much more enjoyable."
Stephanie rests her chin on her hands. "What's your favorite art movement?"
"Cubism."
"Oh, please," Joan says.
"Cubism is a very interesting movement," George protests.
Stephanie sighs into her soda and sucks up some bubbles from the top with her straw.
---
They go to the hardware store next, where Joan accuses George of either knowing everyone who owned anything in the city or only taking them to places owned by his friends. George is deeply and terribly offended.
There's a very nice white-framed mirror at the end of one of the aisles, which Joan decides to buy her as a wedding present.
She holds it with both hands, thumbs pressed against the swirls in the wood, and stares at her reflection. At this angle and with the lights reflecting off the glass from overhead, she can hardly see the little bit of sunburn she got on her neck yesterday, or the dark smudge under her eye.
"Pretty," George says. Joan punches his shoulder and he groans, "I was talking about the mirror!"
Stephanie picks out a dozen or two paint samples for the apartment, and Joan promises they can go back tomorrow and pick colors out for all the rooms.
"Maybe the art history minor will come around and help us paint," Joan drawls, leaning against the register.
George looks up from the bulletins pinned to the wall by the door. "You should get milk-based paint," he tells them. "They sell that here. It's non-toxic and makes the air in your place more breathable."
Joan looks up at her and tucked the receipt in her back pocket. "Why did you want to keep him, again?"
"I like nerds," Stephanie says, smiling. Joan blushes.
George sputters. "Keep me?"
"We need a Boston friend," Stephanie says. She links her arm through Joan's while they walk out of the store, and it's still new and fresh and she wants to rest her head against Joan's, but she thinks that would make conversation a little bit difficult.
He's sulking. She recognizes the set of his shoulders from her brothers. "The last time two girls talked about keeping me I ended up being the roommate who has to wash dishes," he complains. "And my roommates cook a lot."
"We don't need a roommate," Joan says, firmly.
"I think doing the dishes is relaxing," Stephanie says, and ignores the looks she gets from both of them.
Mollified, George says he'll walk them home, which means passing by his building first. When they get there Stephanie wants to see his window, which they have to walk into the parking lot to get a good look at. George is calling Deja and Tina to get them to wave when Stephanie notices from the corner of her eye that Joan has wandered off to stand near a familiar-looking motorcycle. She smirks and doesn't say a thing, letting Joan look in private.
Two faces pop up in the window and wave at them, they both wave back and the curtains swish shut again.
"They're going to come down and look at your paint colors," George says, glancing over his shoulder. The double-take he does makes Stephanie turn, too, and she sighs while George tilts his head at her. "So would she actually kick me in the head if she got mad at me?"
Stephanie thinks about it for a moment. "Yes."
George's green eyes go wide and a bit panic-stricken.
"Only if she thought you really deserved it!" she adds hastily.
George hesitates, then wets his lips and squares his shoulders. Since he's tall but rail-thin, Stephanie doesn't think he looks that intimidating, at least not to Joan's eye, but when he also puts on an ear-to-ear smile before walking over to Joan, she guesses that intimidating wasn't what he was going for.
A few parking spaces away, Joan has her back to them. She's got her arms crossed over her chest, and she's bending over George's dark red motorcycle, peering at the dashboard. She jumps at least six inches in the air when George claps her on the shoulder.
"You can get on if you want," he says, ducking when she shoves at him. The smile doesn't slip off his face. "You don't have to just stare at it."
"I don't want to get on your bike," Joan mutters. "I'm just trying to figure out how you afforded all the customizations."
George tilts his chin up. "I do them myself."
Joan snorts.
"Hey, engineering student here!"
"Environmental engineering!"
Stephanie edges around them to latch onto the hand that Joan isn't gesticulating with. Joan links her fingers though Stephanie's and keeps arguing with George, not missing a beat. Stephanie watches them both for a few minutes, not understanding most of the talk when they actually remember that it's a motorcycle they're arguing about, and thinks that the way Joan rolls her eyes at George is very affectionate, really.
Maybe she'll even tell him that sometime.
The sound of Deja's heels clicking across the parking lot comes before the sight of her, and Stephanie grins when a long arm is thrown around her shoulders. "Oh my God," Deja says, rolling her eyes. "Do we have another bike person?"
Tina strolls by, hands stuck in her pockets, and sticks her tongue out at Deja. "We are not a separate species," she says. "Hey, Joan. Do you have a motorcycle license?"
"Nah," Joan says, rubbing at the back of her neck. "My mom said if I wanted one, I had to buy my own bike, since she'd gotten me a dingy little car, and by the time I had that much money I didn't want to let go of it."
They rattle on, and before Stephanie can feel her eyes start to glaze over she draws the paint samples out of her purse to show to Deja. Their apartment only has four rooms, including the bathroom, but Stephanie as at least five different strips of color for each, and with four hands available she can show Deja which samples are going to be pinned up on which walls.
"I like this," Deja says, tapping a square that's the same purple as her fingernail. Stephanie giggles and Deja grins. "What? It's my favorite color."
"I was thinking maybe this," Stephanie says, pointing to a lighter purple square. "As accents for the yellow. Except I'm not sure if I want the yellow in the kitchen or the living room."
Deja holds the two strips up to the light and squints at them. "The thing is they'll all look a little different when they're on the wall," she says.
"I remember," Stephanie murmurs. She painted her room every couple of years, and the last time she'd wanted a change, Joan had been away. It hadn't been as bad as she'd been expecting. "My sisters helped me paint my room a few years ago."
"What color did you pick for that?"
"Blue," Stephanie says. "Blue is good for bedrooms."
Deja purses her lips together mischievously. "You should go with a nice blue-violet."
Stephanie laughs. "I'm surprised your whole apartment isn't purple," she teases.
"Don't think she hasn't tried!" George calls.
"Why do you think we haven't moved out yet?" Tina smiles.
Deja glares.
"I love you!" Tina apologizes.
Deja rolls her eyes. "I love you too, baby," she says, making Tina laugh. Deja hands the paint samples back to Stephanie and sighs. "I've got to go work on my paper some more," she laments. "I'm only on page twenty-five."
"Only?" Stephanie asks, her eyes wide.
"I need fifteen more."
"That's more than a little horrifying," Joan nods. "I wish you luck, my friend."
Deja salutes before she goes back inside, and Tina is rocking back and forth on her heels, biting her lip. George crosses his arms across his chest and tilts his chin up. "No."
"Please?" Tina whines. "Please, please?"
"You don't want to give her a ride?" Joan drawls.
George snorts. "Tina doesn't want a ride, she--"
"Some of us had to sell their bikes to pay back loans. Some of us would totally let others of us borrow their bikes to go to the store if they had them," Tina says. She wraps her arms around George's shoulders and puts her head on his shoulder. "Please? I'll bring you food. Indian food!"
Groaning, George draws his keys out of his pocket. "You better count yourself lucky that Markus stopped cooking for me for the rest of the week," he mutters.
Tina grabs the keys and smirks. "Thanks."
"Have fun," Joan says, sighing.
"You know my offer still stands--" George starts.
Joan snorts and Stephanie raises her eyebrow. "We should get back to the hotel."
---
The apartment is still nice when they go back the next day. Joan is a little relieved, she'd had a couple of dreams to the contrary, and she thinks the way Stephanie can't stop grinning at the stove is probably a good sign.
"We should just check out of the hotel tomorrow and move in here," Stephanie says, leaning her head out the window. They don't have a balcony, but there is a fire escape that doesn't look like it would be impossible to get to.
"We don't have any furniture," Joan says. "We have to at least get a bed before we move in."
"We could get one today!" Stephanie says. "I think we don't have to dig into the savings too much to furnish this place, really. Not if we make things do double-duty. You know, the dining table is also the desk, stuff like that."
"My mom says she put out an ad for my car today," Joan says, sighing.
The money will help, she knows that, and she likes Stephanie's car better anyway even if Mr. Colbert was the one who bought it - it's a Stang (and the payments are finished, too, which she guesses matters now) - but she thinks about her little Oldsmobile sitting in the driveway all alone, and wonders who her mom is going to sell it to. She'd spent a lot of time on her back underneath that car, and she hadn't even said goodbye to it. And maybe it knew she was looking whenever a motorcycle stopped next to them at a light.
She shakes herself when she catches Stephanie staring at her, and wanders over to hang the mirror up. Stephanie wants it next to the door, where she plans to put a little table to put their keys on top of and their shoes underneath. She'd had to leave behind a few of her favorite books to get it to fit, but she'd brought her tool kit with her. There's a nail just the right size for the mirror, and it only takes a couple of minutes to get it straight.
"I'm excited," Stephanie says, appearing in the mirror over Joan's shoulder. She smiles shyly and sticks her hands in her dress pockets, and Joan turns around with the hammer still in her hand. "I've kind of been picking paint colors out for our first place since sixth grade."
Joan nearly drops the hammer on her foot. "We weren't together till eighth-"
"You were very cute in your soccer uniform," Stephanie says, trailing a finger down Joan's shirt.
Add another thing to the list of 'stuff Joan wishes she'd brought with her.'
"Maybe I can get my mom to mail it up," Joan whispers, laying her hand across Stephanie's stomach to steer her to the wall.
Stephanie's back scrapes against the bricks, and she bangs her head hard no less than three times. But Joan's hands are steady and she whispers softly to Stephanie about how she is very beautiful, makes her forget the dark blotch on her eye, and Stephanie buries her face into Joan's neck and holds on tight.
"I'm going be a mess for the wedding," Stephanie laments when they've peeled themselves apart, prodding the new bruises Joan sucked onto her neck. Twisting around, she scowls at the red marks crisscrossing her back.
Joan shrugs. "They'll have faded by then."
Scowling, Stephanie shrugs her dress back on. "In the meantime, you need to stop manhandling me so much. I want to look nice."
"You always look nice," Joan murmurs, a vacant, blissful smile on her face.
In spite of herself, the corners of Stephanie's mouth quirk up, and she scoots over to sit behind Joan, wraps her arms around Joan's neck.
"Wanna go pick out a mattress?" she grins.
---
The elevator is working the next day, and Joan leans against the kitchen counter with Stephanie, who sits on top of it since they hadn't found any chairs in their thrift-store run the day before. Joan's hands twitch every time she sees one of the deliverymen bring in a new piece of furniture - new to them, anyway - but Stephanie keeps pinching her whenever she moves away from the counter.
"You can stretch out your arms when we paint," Stephanie says, raising an eyebrow at her. "There's not much more to bring in, anyway."
"I can deal with not having a dresser for a while," Joan says, fidgeting. She wonders how many of her perfumes Stephanie has brought. They'd all been in rows on top of her dresser, though Joan still doesn't know what the order was. She'd always looked at them whenever Stephanie was off changing out of her uniform or taking a shower or talking to her parents. "But we seriously have to get a couch today."
Stephanie kicks her legs up and lets them fall back to the cabinet doors. "I thought you said we could move in once we had a bed."
"We can," Joan says. She'd already told her mom that this was going to be their last night in the hotel, and her mom keeps sending texts reminding Joan to take pictures of the apartment. "But think how much better it'll be if we wake up and have a couch delivered after breakfast tomorrow."
Stephanie looks down at her and smiles.
When they're alone again, lying on the mattress they just bought themselves, Joan lets her eyes fall shut. Stephanie is lying with her head on Joan's stomach, and Joan has her hand tangled in Stephanie's hair, and she's pretty sure she could go on like this forever. Even if they don't get a couch.
"You're happy, aren't you?" she asks, mostly because she does need to know, but also because she thinks if they're quiet much longer she's going to fall asleep.
Stephanie takes a breath. "Yeah," she whispers. "I love you."
"I love you too," Joan says. She brushes Stephanie's hair back from her face. She has to take a breath, because her throat is dry, and it doesn't really help, but the words come out even if they are creaky. "I'm sorry if I was a jerk the other day."
"You weren't," Stephanie murmurs. She hesitates. "Well, you were, but I forgive you."
Joan is quiet.
Crying over a sink, even if she'd splashed enough water in her face to make it hard to tell, had hurt. It still hurt. She kept trying not to think about it, but it was hard when Stephanie kept looking at her whenever she spent too long staring into space.
"I'm sorry I brought up your dad," Stephanie whispers. She takes off her glasses and stretches her arm out to hook them on the headboard. She looks smaller, younger without them. "That was uncalled for."
Joan nods and hopes she can feel it, because there's a hard knot in her throat that she doesn't want to try talking around just then. She squeezes her eyes shut when Stephanie slides up the bed, and doesn't move while Stephanie wraps both her arms around her, tucking Joan's face into the crook of her neck. It makes her feel small and tiny and powerless and loved.
At least she knows Stephanie brought her peach perfume with her, now.
For a while it's enough, Stephanie and peaches, and the sunlight beating down on them because one thing they did not find in the thrift stores yesterday was a decent set of curtains. Stephanie needs something decorative, Joan wants an effect like a solar eclipse, it's going to take a while to satisfy both of them.
"Stephi," Joan says, swallowing. She hopes her voice, speaking against Stephanie's skin, isn't all that muffled. She starts, "I don't think that. I don't."
Stephanie kisses the top of her head. "Shh."
Joan wets her lips, and the knots in her throat are tighter and harder than they've been since the fight, but she can hear Stephanie's heart here and it's hardly sped up at all, and she doesn't know if she'll get this chance again. Not the chance and the nerve.
"I don't think your parents are coming to the wedding," she says.
The apartment is as quiet as it was when they first walked in.
She thinks about Stephanie showing up at her doorstep that night, in her favorite shirt and jeans and heels. Crying. Nails broken and her eye swelling and her hair just barely brushed. She thinks about Stephanie sitting on her bathroom sink and cleaning off her face, and Joan sinking to her knee in the water Stephanie had splashed to the floor.
Joan thinks about kissing Stephanie's finger where it joined her hand, because she didn't have a ring.
"I want them to," Stephanie says, softly.
Joan kisses her collarbone.
"If we could have anything, I would want to get married outside," Stephanie says. She starts to card her fingers through Joan's hair, and Joan doesn't even fidget. "In the country, with flowers on the trees. And in my hair. Slipcovers and cushions on all the seats, so people are comfortable and don't complain when I make them sit through my big sister singing my three favorite hymns."
Smiling, Joan wriggles an arm under Stephanie to tug her closer.
"You wandering around fixing my brothers' bow ties before it all starts, because they never listen when mom tells them how to tie them. Me grabbing you to talk about stuff, and you laughing because I'm wrapped up in some tablecloth, trying to keep you from seeing my dress. And my dad walking me down the aisle. And crying."
She sniffs, and Joan holds her tight enough that she thinks she hears both their ribs protesting.
"My dad never cries," Stephanie says. Her voice is damp. "Not at any of my sisters' weddings. But he'd cry at mine. I'm his baby girl."
She buries her face in Joan's hair and takes deep breaths. Joan waits for a minute, then wriggles out of her grip to make up the height difference. Her socked feet rub against Stephanie's shins, and she brings Stephanie's head against her shoulder even though she can already hear her apologizing for getting Joan's shirt wet.
"My mom will cry," Joan promises. She rubs her hand up and down Stephanie's back. It still hurts to talk, the knots in her throat gathering at the back of her tongue, but Stephanie needs her voice now. "And I'll have to tie my brother's tie. And if you want I bet he'll walk you down the aisle."
"He's not my brother."
Joan doesn't know what to say to that.
Stephanie leans back just far enough so she can see Joan's face. There are dark smudges around both her eyes now, but they're definitely just makeup, and Stephi seems to know they're there from the way she smears her tears away.
She grabs the front of Joan's shirt, twisting it up in her fingers. "I want you to promise you'll cry at our daughter's wedding."
"Promise," Joan whispers.
"Even if she makes you promise not to."
"Double promise."
Sniffing, Stephanie sits up. "I look awful," she says, wiping at her face with her palms. "We can't go shopping today. Everyone will just stare at me."
Joan lies across her lap and gazes up at her face. "Stephi, you look fine. You look beautiful."
"I look awful," she repeats, pressing her hands over her face.
"Stephi?"
"The bruise still hasn't healed," she whispers, fingers curling into fists. "It's all anyone looks at."
Joan opens her mouth and reaches up to wrap her hands around Stephanie's wrists. "I can't see it," she says, tugging Stephanie's hands down. "Stephi."
"People must think I'm some kind of wreck."
"No."
"But-"
"No. Stephanie, listen to me." Joan manages to sit up without actually letting go of her hands, although twisting so she's facing Stephanie is a little harder. "Sometimes ... sometimes you only see the ... what you think are the worst parts of yourself. But I wouldn't lie to you, would I?"
Stephanie frowns. "...No."
Joan touches their foreheads together. "You're beautiful, Stephi. And I love you. And we're going to get married."
Just the corner of Stephanie's mouth twitches up, and she lets out a breath over Joan's lips. "Yeah," she says. Her lips twitch again, and it's nearly a real smile. "Mrs. and Mrs. Stewart."
Joan is going to regret this later, but... "George would probably walk you down the aisle. If you asked."
Stephanie laughs, and clamps her hand over her mouth.
Part Three
Author: politicette, themistoklis
Fandom: Fake News: The Daily Show, The Colbert Report
Characters/Pairings: cis!girls "Stephanie" Colbert/Joan Stewart (genderbended from "Stephen" Colbert, Jon Stewart), assorted "Colbert" family members, assorted original characters
Rating: R
Length: ~26,300 words
Warnings: TRIGGER WARNINGS for domestic violence, homophobia, alcohol use
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Notes: Thank you so much to paperscribe for betaing this piece for us. We started it so long ago we legitimately do not remember most of the first half, but apparently it's in okay shape.
Summary: Joan and "Stephanie" run away from home to get married, and it's going to be totally awesome.
Part One
Joan flops down on the bed the second they get back and doesn't open her eyes while Stephanie slips her shoes off, puts her purse up. She can hear Stephanie moving around the room, and she keeps her eyes closed, trying not to picture the scene in the Colbert's kitchen, hoping that Stephanie will keep not noticing how long it took for anyone to ask where she was.
She doesn't look up until she hears Stephanie giggling.
[GEORGE ARDEN] ":-D hey girl"
The mattress sinks next to Joan as Stephanie eases down, resting her head against the pillow. Joan wriggles up just enough so she can see her typing.
[me] "hey :-D"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "how r u? & how is ur lovely gf?"
Joan rolls her eyes, and Stephanie elbows her for reading over her shoulder.
She smiles. [me] "still lovely. i'm okay. you?"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "that's good. i'm v bored in the back of a calculus lecture"
"I woulda thought for sure he was a dropout," Joan whispers, her breath tickling Stephanie's ear, and Stephanie muffles her giggles with the back of her hand.
[me] "in the summer???"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "trying to make room in sched for a minor"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "and the perils of double-majoring"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "also the professor is hot"
[me] "that's disgusting tbh"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "hey, calm down the prof. is a guy"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "it's not a sexist thing."
[GEORGE ARDEN] "dude works out"
Joan snorts while Stephanie puzzles over students taking classes because of what the professor looks like. She prods Stephanie a little and takes the phone over, while Stephanie curls up against her side.
This interlude is more than welcome (even if it is George). Joan isn't looking forward to Colbert-family wedding talk.
[me] "it's joan. what're the good neighborhoods here. apartment-shopping later"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "hey, lovely gf ;-) the best neighborhood around here is mine, obviously. there are a couple of places up in the building down the road if you want"
"Hell no," Joan mutters, at the same time Stephanie says, "Aw."
They look at each other for a moment, the phone resting in Joan's palm. Then Stephanie lunges.
Joan sticks her hands in the air while Stephanie tries to grab the phone back. It means she can only keep herself on the bed with one hand, and Stephanie doesn't seem to care if getting the phone back means knocking Joan to the carpet, but Joan is pretty sure they should talk about this first.
"There's no harm in just looking," Stephanie protests.
"Yes, there is. You'll fall in love with a breakfast nook or something and then I'll be stuck living next to motorcycle guy."
"So what? The motorcycle guy is nice!"
"We've only known him for a few days! He could be a serial killer!"
Stephanie looks at Joan and raises one dark eyebrow.
"He's not a serial killer," she says, coaxing the phone out of Joan's hands. "His roommates are too nice to live with a serial killer. Besides, I'd like to live on the same block with some friends. Wouldn't you?"
Joan hesitates. Thinks about shared dinners and maybe watching Lord of the Rings movies with someone who named his pet from the series. Hanging out with Tina, who curses as much at the news as she does. "Yeah," she says, slowly.
Stephanie sits up with her legs crossed underneath her, and Joan debates sliding off the mattress onto the floor before crawling around to kneel behind her and watch her type. She steadies herself with her hands on Stephanie's shoulders, and Stephanie absently pats her hand, typing with just five fingers.
[me] ":-) we'd love to see. when can we visit?"
[GEORGE ARDEN] "i'll have to check"
---
Joan's stomach hurts, but she tells Stephanie to go ahead and order food anyway. Then she sits on the bed with a pillow hugged to her stomach and tries to think of a way to talk Stephanie out of calling her mother back.
They'd gotten texts from Joan's mom the night they'd left. They hadn't gotten a single message from Stephanie's mother (or the rest of her family) for days.
And Stephanie hadn't talked about it, exactly, but Joan got the impression Mrs. Colbert never moved to stand between her daughter and her husband.
When Stephanie's done talking, she flops back on the bed. "I think I might paint my nails before the delivery boy gets here," she says, wiggling her toes. "What color do you think I should use?"
"Purple," Joan hazards, which makes Stephanie giggle. She rolls over onto her stomach and stretches out to fish in her makeup bag on the floor. Joan hesitates, then sets the pillow aside and shifts to her knees. The mattress tilts funny while she crawls across it, her fingers following the diamond pattern woven into the fabric. It takes forever before she's next to Stephanie, close enough to stop moving and brace herself on the bedding.
"Listen." Joan wets her lips. "I ... I think..."
Stephanie casts a look over her shoulder without raising up. "Not purple?"
"Because I thought maybe not," she continues hurriedly, steamrolling over Joan's attempts to speak. "It doesn't go with my dress for tomorrow, and anyways I'm not even sure it's a good shade for me. I'm more of an autumn, I think."
It was easier to ask Stephanie to marry her.
"I've got a good goldenrod here," Stephanie says. "Although I'll need a towel before I get started."
Glass clinks together and she wriggles backwards a bit, giving herself enough room to sit back up on the bed and flip around, so she's facing the headboard. Joan reaches out and takes the tiny bottles from her, curls her fingers around them, tugs them against her chest. Before Stephanie can do any more than frown, Joan takes a deep breath.
"I don't think you should call your mother back tonight," she blurts.
Stephanie blinks at her. "You think it's too late?"
Joan sighs. "No. I mean maybe. Maybe she just wouldn't want to hear from you."
"Joan," Stephanie says. Her fingers are curled tight against her palms. "She sent me a message."
"I just mean. I just." She wished Stephanie could see this herself. "If she knew why we came up here, maybe she wouldn't - maybe she wouldn't have sent you a message."
Both of Stephanie's eyebrows come down and Joan shuffles back. She sets the bottles of nail polish down and tries to sit in a way that doesn't make her feel like she's about to fall over. It doesn't really help.
Stephanie clambers off the bed and puts her hands on her hips. "My mother loves me," she says, two bright spots of color hovering in her cheeks. "Of course she wants to know where I am! The only reason she waited to ask - the only reason is because I stormed out," she snaps, thumping her open palm against her chest. "I left without saying anything. She was just waiting until she thought I would calm down. I bet she was worried I wouldn't answer her if she tried to call me right away."
"Stephi-" Joan wants to gather Stephanie up in her arms and rock her.
"That's why she left a message instead of calling. She wants to hear from me, Joan, she does!" Stephanie keeps her hand curled against her chest and takes a few deep breaths, wets her lip and draws her chin up. "She's going to be very excited when she gets the news."
Joan slips off the bed and reaches out to grab Stephanie's free hand, holding on as tight as she can. "Stephi, I don't want you to get hurt. You weren't - you weren't the one who was angry. You left to keep yourself safe," she says. She reaches out for Stephanie's other hand when Stephanie doesn't jerk back.
"I didn't call and I didn't leave a note. Not like you," she says, her voice shaking. "She might think I hate her. I have to call her back, Joan."
Joan raises Stephanie's knuckles to her lips. "She doesn't ... she doesn't accept you, Stephi."
"You'll see, Joan," Stephanie says. She kisses Joan's cheek and takes a deep breath. "You'll see."
---
Stephanie waits until that night to call her mother back.
She sits on the bed with her legs crossed underneath her and cups the phone to her ear. Joan's old soccer-team shirt wrinkles up on Stephanie's chest when she leans back, exposing a stripe of skin between it and the waistband of her pajama shorts. Joan left her clothes (and her towel) piled on a chair outside the bathroom door, so Stephanie figures she will be able to start winding down the conversation when Joan ducks out to grab them. Not that Joan wouldn't give her privacy for the call, if she asked. She just doesn't want to ask.
She twists a lock of hair around two of her fingers, waiting for the phone to stop ringing. Usually, someone picks it up after three.
It's just getting to the point when she's wondering whether to leave a message when she hears a slightly-breathless, "Hello?" from the other end of the line. "This is Mrs. Colbert."
"Hi!" Stephanie exclaims. She doesn't know why she should be, she's only talking to her mom, but she finds herself a little nervous.
South Carolina is quiet for a moment. "Where are you, Stephanie?" her mom asks. A door shuts behind her, and Stephanie pictures her sunk down in the chair in the kitchen, the one with the worn-through pillow on the seat.
"I'm safe, don't worry," Stephanie says. Her words tumble over each other in her hurry to make her mother understand. "I just wanted to see how you all were doing and also to tell you about something that's happening soon. Is Daddy home?"
"Not right now," her mother says. Stephanie relaxes, just a little, and then tenses up when she notices it. A daughter should be announcing her engagement to her parents face-to-face. "But what does safe mean? Are you with people?"
"Yes, Joan is here!" she assures, nodding emphatically. "I mean, she's not here right now, but she's with me. She's actually about what I have to talk to you about."
"Oh."
Stephanie twists and starts patting around the side table, looking for the wedding magazine. She wants to describe the bouquet she picked out, the shoes she's thinking of. "It's so exciting, Mama! I've got so much planning to do, and I'm, I'm really feeling overwhelmed, so I'm so glad you called. I don't think I could do this by myself."
"Stephanie, slow down. I can hardly understand you."
Her hand finds the corner of the magazine, and she tugs it into her lap without knocking too much of anything over. "Joan proposed!" she says, and she can't push the grin back, even if it does hurt the corners of her mouth. "I could use your help with the wedding. We really want to have it done by the time school starts, since we're both going to be so busy with classes, and I just can't make up my mind on anything."
The other end of the line is quiet so long that Stephanie pulls her phone away from her ear to check that the call is still connected.
"Mama?"
"I don't think you understand what you're doing, Stephanie," her mom says, quiet and thin.
Stephanie inhales. "That's why I called you, Mama."
"I'm glad you did," she says. "I think you need more time to think about ... things. Maybe you ought to come home for a while. You should be with your family."
She picks at the bottom of her shirt. "I'm making my family."
"Isn't this all fast? Don't you want to think about it some more?"
The hotel gave them a box of tissues with the logo embossed on the cardboard. There weren't many inside, but it was still on the end table from where Stephanie had taken it out earlier to do her nails (after the food came). She pulls it into her lap now and balls one up to dab at her nose with. It's cooler in Massachusetts than South Carolina. She thinks she might be coming down with a cold.
"Aren't you happy for me, Mama?"
"Oh," her mother says. "Stephanie. I just. You need to know what you're doing. You need to understand." She swallows. "Why don't you come home and talk?"
Stephanie holds the phone away from her mouth and blows a little into the tissue. She can hear the water for Joan's shower still running through the walls, and she thinks that after this a steamy bath is just what she needs to clear herself up.
"I think you should come visit us," she says. "I could meet you at the airport."
Her Mama sighs. "Your father's home," she murmurs. "I have to go. Think about it, Stephanie."
"Let me know if you have a free weekend. Goodbye, Mama."
"Goodbye."
Stephanie plugs her phone in to charge near the window and starts pinning her hair up. When Joan swings the bathroom door open to grab her towel and her clothes, Stephanie is waiting, her nightgown piled on top of Joan's things.
Joan's eyes always look bluer when her face is pink. "Hi," she says.
Smiling, Stephanie brushes a damp curl off of her forehead. "Do you mind keeping me company in the bath?"
A little grin tugs at the corner of Joan's mouth and she shuffles backwards, making room for Stephanie to walk past her. "There's a radio in here," Joan says.
"Mmm." Stephanie sits on the lip of the tub and lets the water run hot.
---
The building has apartments open on the top floor and the bottom, the latter of which Stephanie doesn't like even before George has ushered them through the door. The windows are too big, and the floors are too hard, and none of the doorways have actual doors except the one leading to the bathroom. Jonah thinks that's weird, too, so she and Joan manage to outvote George by an overwhelming majority on that one.
Joan and George discover a mutual hatred of side-by-side refrigerators, but that doesn't get Joan to stop rolling her eyes at him. Stephanie stands to the side and just smiles when Joan glances over at her to make sure Stephanie won't ask her to be nicer.
At her side, her purse is quiet. She didn't even bring her cell phone.
The landlady says that the elevator is broken (but that it will be fixed soon, which makes Joan's mouth slant), so they have to climb the stairs to get to the other unit. Stephanie walks between Joan and George, wishing she hadn't worn heels, and thinking she never would've painted the hallway this shade of green.
"If you move in and it's not working, I'm pretty sure George and I can get boxes up these stairs," Jonah says, thumping his hand against the wall. George sours a bit and Jonah smirks. "Oh, come on. You have got muscles in those skinny arms."
"Not for this many flights of stairs," George mutters.
Jonah holds the door open for them and the landlady starts chatting about square footage and the number of outlets.
"There aren't like, street parties every night or something, are there?" Joan asks.
Hands stuck in his pockets, George snorts. "My roommates would toss water on them if there were."
"I would not," Jonah says. George raises an eyebrow at him and he says, "Okay, it was only that once."
Stephanie stares at him and he blushes a dark pink. She can't picture him leaving his room with an uncreased collar, let alone tossing a bucket of water out the window.
"This guy was drunk," he explains, waving his hands. "And he bothered Deja on her way up."
Joan grins. "That's pretty awesome."
"I know, right? Jonah can lift like fifty pounds over his head," George says. Jonah starts to talk about how it's not really all that impressive, but their voices fade out as Stephanie gets adjusted to the warm light.
Walking to the center of the room, Stephanie can see almost the entire apartment. There's no door in the archway between the empty living room and the kitchen to her left, and the door leading to the bedroom on her right is open.
It's small. She can tell that they won't both be able to have desks, or both a couch and an armchair. She can see where Joan would sit, on the couch, bent over her laptop. There's shelves built between the windows, an entertainment center, and she can see where they would put cards from Joan's mother around the base of the television.
The landlady says they can paint if they repaint it white when they move out, and Stephanie can see buying paint and having Larry help them when he comes up for the wedding.
She doesn't know what her mother would send them. Or what colors her sister Lulu would recommend for the bathroom.
"Do you like it?" George asks, wandering over to her.
"I think it would look better in a pale yellow," she says, and he laughs.
He stops short of holding his hand out, but he does shuffle his feet in a way that Stephanie knows is supposed to be comforting. "You look sad," he murmurs, softly. "Are you okay?"
"You should come see the shower!" Joan yells.
"I'm fine," Stephanie says. Because she is. They're apartment-shopping. And she has a shower to look at now.
There's a window in the shower. It's thick glass, the bubbled kind that you can't really see through. All she can tell is that it's sunny outside. She could tell her mom not to bring her rain jacket when she bought the plane ticket - she wonders if there's anywhere in the city where you can have an outdoor wedding.
Joan's standing behind the glass door and turns to look at Stephanie when she comes through the door. "There's a window in the shower," she says, pointing at it. "Is that weird? I think that's weird. Why would you put a window in the shower?"
But renting a place is expensive, just for a day, and she would like to be able to decorate it however she wants. So maybe sunlight would be enough, in a place with windows.
George pokes his head in over Stephanie's shoulder. "There's no room to have more wall space for a window."
Jonah calls from further inside the living room, and Stephanie guesses he knows about these sorts of things. "The glass is special, though. Nobody can see in."
"It's weird," Joan says. She looks at Stephanie. "Do you like it?"
If they don't invite very many people, they could have the wedding here. If they keep the guest list down to the people most important to them.
"Yes," she says. She takes a breath. "It's perfect."
Joan writes a check for first and last month's rent, murmuring to Stephanie that all her hours working at the drive-in were totally worth it, now. Even though she had to wear that stupid uniform.
And no, she's not going to tell George what it looked like.
Stephanie smiles. She had liked that uniform.
---
"I called my mom last night," Stephanie says, as George brings the pizza to their table. Jonah had gone to work before they'd made it here. "So she knows about the wedding, now, and that we're safe."
The bread stick sours in Joan's mouth. She curls her hand around her drink and carefully raises it to her lips, absolutely not spilling any over herself or Stephanie, and keeps her eyes shut while she gulps down ice-cold ... something-carbonated. Eyes shut, hand tight around her glass.
On the other side of the booth, George sits down and starts rattling off stories about every time he's ever eaten at this place, which (from letting the words wash over her) Joan thinks is every meal he's had since moving into the apartment sophomore year of college. Plus a few extra while pulling all-nighters.
Some of the stories are even funny, like the time his (ex-)boyfriend threw a drink in his face and stormed out of the place, so Joan kind of hates to interrupt. She can't hold it back anymore than she can keep her eyes from cracking open, though.
"You shouldn't have called her," she says. George stops mid-sentence.
Stephanie's mouth tightens. "She's my mother, Joan."
Stabbing pizza with a plastic fork is not satisfying. "I don't want her to hurt you anymore," Joan says. She drags a mushroom off her slice.
"She's not going to."
Joan is vaguely aware that George is glancing around the restaurant more than Stephanie, who is staring at her and can't seem to blink at the same time. Her stomach is churning on the bread she inhaled to make up for the breakfast she missed, and the toppings she's picked off of her pizza, and it tightens up all around the edges because Stephanie is looking at her, not the people who might be looking at them, and at least that's something new and different and wonderfully fucking shiny for their new home in their new city.
"Yes, she is. She thinks this is wrong, Stephi. She thinks we're wrong. She thinks you're wrong."
The fabric on the booth benches is slippery, and Stephanie slides back easily - Joan has to hold on tight when she reaches out and grabs her wrists. "Please," she says, holding on tight enough that Stephanie's skin goes white. "Stephi."
Biting her lip, Stephanie leans forward until her forehead brushes Joan's. "She didn't say that."
"There are couches in the bathroom," George stammers.
Joan looks sideways to glare at him, and he slides down in his seat a little - but doesn't look away. "If you want some privacy," he adds, snatching up his glass to down most of it in a few gulps.
Holding onto Stephanie so tightly means that it's fairly easy for her to get dragged across the seat, and then she's on her feet and it's too late not to follow her girlfriend through the mess of tables and chairs into the back of the restaurant.
Stephanie gets inside before her and stops in front of a couch, but doesn't sit down. She wriggles her hand out of Joan's grip and turns around, wraps both her arms across her front. Her hair is falling in her eyes, and she blows at it, tosses her head in a way that makes the back of Joan's neck flush hot.
"Look-" Joan starts, looking over at the woman at the sink. "I-"
Stepping forward so her hair's falling into Joan's face, now, Stephanie stoops enough to put her eyes on level with Joan's and yells in the quiet near-whisper they'd had to develop for fights in the dark, Joan on Stephanie's floor in a sleeping bag, Stephanie's legs tangled with hers, and the Colberts just down the hallway.
"Stop it! Stop just, just acting like my family is evil. They're not, Joan. My mom contacted me because she loves me," she says, her eyes dark and shining behind her glasses. "She loves me and she wanted to know where I was, and just because she's not the same as your mom doesn't mean that you get to tell me I shouldn't talk to her!"
The hand dryer's still blasting as the woman walks out, the door swinging shut behind her, and as soon as she's gone Joan reaches up to touch the side of Stephanie's face.
"Stephi, babe, if you could've seen yourself when - when you came over that night," she says, taking a deep breath and shoving the nausea down as much as she can, "I thought you were going to ask me to take you to the hospital. You were so scared, and so--"
"That wasn't her!"
"It was your dad! Your dad hurt you and there is no goddamn reason--" Joan sees Stephanie's mouth go tight on the curse and nearly wishes she'd edited herself.
Nearly. "You weren't there, Joan, you didn't see it, he was just angry because I--"
"It was not your fault!"
Stephanie slaps her palms against Joan's shoulders and bunches Joan's shirt up in her fingers, making her stagger back a little. "You weren't there, Joan!" she snaps. "And you weren't on the phone with Mama last night! I'm still family, she said so."
Joan swallows and it hurts. "Did she say she was sorry, too?"
"There's nothing to say sorry for."
"Did she ask how you were? How you got here?" Joan takes Stephanie's hands in hers and kisses her knuckles, breathes out over her skin. "Did she ask where you were staying or what you were doing for money? Did she ask you anything?"
Stephanie shakes her head. "This is exactly why I didn't tell you I was calling her."
The bathroom is stuffy, and Joan is breathing through her teeth. Her hands ache and the nausea isn't going away no matter how many time she swallows, and Stephanie is starting to look at her with less anger than worry. "Is she coming to the wedding?"
Stephanie takes off her glasses and rubs her knuckles against her eyes. "I couldn't give her a date," she says.
"I don't--" Joan stops, and rubs her hands over her face. She might have to sit down on one of those couches if she can move past Stephanie to get to it. "I don't get how you can't see this. We had to hide from them, Stephi, just so you'd be safe. That's not how it's supposed to be."
"Maybe not," Stephanie says, "but people are supposed to stay married forever, too."
Mouth open, Joan takes a step backwards.
Stephanie stares at her for a minute and then put her glasses back on, latches onto herself. "Sorry," she whispers. She shakes her head. "But Joan, that's just it. Not everything is perfect the first time around. Sometimes people need time, to grow and to figure things out and to get used to change and--"
"I haven't heard from my dad since we moved," Joan hisses. "Sometimes people don't change."
"Not everyone is like your dad, Joan. Now, my parents may fight, and I know that they aren't perfect. But they would never just leave me! They're going to come around!"
"People don't come around! Your parents think that we're going to hell! Your dad hurts you, all the time. They're ... They're bad people!"
"They are not!" And Stephanie's voice cracks, just a little, just enough to make her face go dark red. She takes a step back like she was worried Joan was going to reach out and touch her. "You may hate your father, but that doesn't mean I have to hate mine!"
Joan gulps a few times, clenches her jaw. "I never said I hated him."
"Oh, Joan," Stephanie whispers, staring at her. "I wish you could see yourself."
She almost chokes. The back of her throat tastes sour and Joan hates it, hates it, shakes and turns around and storms forward to a sink, the bathroom walls going blurry around her, and she shovels water down her throat in cupped hands. She keeps going even when she swallows some wrong and starts coughing, keeps going when she splashes most of a few handfuls up her nose, keeps going when Stephanie walks over (Joan can just hear her heels clicking over the water) and wraps her arms around Joan from behind.
She's hot all over and her ears are ringing and she hates herself for wearing a dark shirt that day, because every time she looks down she expects to see a plaid school skirt and Mary-Janes instead of her faded jeans and old boots. She hates this. She's supposed to be the strong one now.
"I'm not like him," Stephanie says into her hair. She clenches her arms around Joan's water-sloshed stomach and kisses the shell of her ear. "I'm not going to leave you," she says. "Not ever, Joan. It's okay."
Joan holds onto the rim of the sink even after Stephanie reaches around her to turn the water off. Someone comes in and out behind them, quietly, and they just stand there until they're alone again. Joan raises her head to survey the damage and her stomach twists up all over again when she sees Stephanie's staring at her in the mirror.
She wipes the back of her hand across her eyes. Stephanie leans forward and kisses her cheek, softly, and Joan takes a breath. "I never thought you - did I make you think that I thought you were like him?"
"No," Stephanie says. She rubs her hand up and down Joan's arms. "I just wanted you to hear it."
They stand there and just breathe, and two more people come in and out behind them. Joan starts to feel like her stomach isn't warring its way out of her body and lets go of the sink, slowly, easing around to face Stephanie without pushing her off. Stephanie touches her hand to the side of Joan's face, her fingertips cool even though Joan's still dripping water, and now that Joan thinks about it she is really hot.
"Do you want to go home?" Stephanie asks, trailing her hand along Joan's skin. "The hotel? ...The apartment?"
"Nah," Joan says. She swallows. "I'm hungry. I just need. I just need to catch my breath."
"Okay."
Joan wraps her hands around her own shoulders. "Are you mad at me?"
Stephanie kisses her. "Yeah," she whispers. "But I love you."
"Love you too."
Smiling, Stephanie tugs her away from the sink. "I should probably go check on my purse."
Joan glances at the couches. "I'm going to sit here. For a minute," she says, and squeezes Stephanie's hand back before she leaves.
She braces herself on the arm of the couch before she sits down, and then she rests her elbows on her knees and stares at her boots. She breathes in and out, with her eyes shut, counting.
---
George is still sitting at the booth.
All right. She can work with this. Just, breathe. Keep breathing.
At the mouth of the hallway leading back to the bathroom, Stephanie smoothes down her clothes. Her hair had looked fine in the mirror, but rubbing at her eyes had smeared her make-up a little. Not much. If she was just with Joan, she would do a touch-up, but she thinks George will definitely not be there if she disappears into the bathroom again.
She slides sideways into her seat and carefully glances through her purse to make sure everything's still there (it is, of course, she knew it would be). Then she decides to eat Joan's pizza slice, because it's the same thing anyway, and she doesn't entirely mind that Joan picked all the mushrooms off already. She's hungry, still, underneath all the knots in her stomach, and she'd rather have mostly-fresh pizza than reheated pizza in a few hours at the hotel.
"So," George says, scratching the back of his neck. "Um. You okay?"
"I'm fine," Stephanie answers, automatically. She hesitates and decides it's pretty much true. As long as Joan is steady when she comes back to the table, at least. She smiles, a little, and cuts into her pizza. It's kind of warm. "Joan can be overprotective."
George wets his lips. "Look, it's none of my business, but..."
"No," Stephanie says, her shoulders tensing. She slides a mushroom off onto Joan's new plate for when she gets back. "It's not."
"I was going to say I'd be here if you wanted to talk," George says.
She feels color and heat come to her face. "Oh."
George grins, slow and lazy, the kind of grin that the rest of the cheerleading squad would have pushed her at. Then he pops the end of a bread stick in his mouth and mumbles, "No problem. How're you two liking your time in Boston?"
"It's been lovely," she says, because the important parts have been. "We just have a lot to do. Especially now that we've got furniture to buy for the apartment."
"Thrift stores," George says, nodding. "I got everything but my mattress from thrift stores. And I've only had a chair collapse on me once."
"Did you have to put it together yourself?" Joan asks, and Stephanie hopes George was too busy jumping to notice she did, too.
Smirking, Joan eases down into the booth. She stretches an arm along the back, behind Stephanie's shoulders, and folds her pizza in half to pick it up. George twists sideways in the booth and stretches his legs out along his seat, trying to look casual and failing miserably when, while raising his drink to his mouth, he spills ice down the front of his shirt.
Joan giggles.
"Oh," George says, his grin cutting. "Oh, lovely girlfriend."
"You shut up," Joan says, and Stephanie's pretty sure she kicks him under the table.
She looks okay. Only a little bit of the hair around her face is still wet, and you can hardly tell from looking that she had been crying, just a little. Not that Stephanie would say that to her face. She just reaches over, underneath the table, and slides her fingers through Joan's.
"So are you missing class for this?" Joan asks, squeezing Stephanie's hand. She bites into her pizza and raises an eyebrow at George. "Your professors today not hot?"
"Hey now," George says. "When you have to take a math class you could've exempted if your high school had offered the AP course, you can get back to me. In the meantime, I get to try to make it interesting."
"What are you majoring in?" Stephanie asks.
"And minoring?" Joan asks (but she's rolling her eyes).
"Environmental engineering, ecology, and art history. And art history is not useless," he adds, glaring at Joan. She closes her mouth and glances sideways at Stephanie. "You see references to old works of art everywhere. And it makes visiting museums much more enjoyable."
Stephanie rests her chin on her hands. "What's your favorite art movement?"
"Cubism."
"Oh, please," Joan says.
"Cubism is a very interesting movement," George protests.
Stephanie sighs into her soda and sucks up some bubbles from the top with her straw.
---
They go to the hardware store next, where Joan accuses George of either knowing everyone who owned anything in the city or only taking them to places owned by his friends. George is deeply and terribly offended.
There's a very nice white-framed mirror at the end of one of the aisles, which Joan decides to buy her as a wedding present.
She holds it with both hands, thumbs pressed against the swirls in the wood, and stares at her reflection. At this angle and with the lights reflecting off the glass from overhead, she can hardly see the little bit of sunburn she got on her neck yesterday, or the dark smudge under her eye.
"Pretty," George says. Joan punches his shoulder and he groans, "I was talking about the mirror!"
Stephanie picks out a dozen or two paint samples for the apartment, and Joan promises they can go back tomorrow and pick colors out for all the rooms.
"Maybe the art history minor will come around and help us paint," Joan drawls, leaning against the register.
George looks up from the bulletins pinned to the wall by the door. "You should get milk-based paint," he tells them. "They sell that here. It's non-toxic and makes the air in your place more breathable."
Joan looks up at her and tucked the receipt in her back pocket. "Why did you want to keep him, again?"
"I like nerds," Stephanie says, smiling. Joan blushes.
George sputters. "Keep me?"
"We need a Boston friend," Stephanie says. She links her arm through Joan's while they walk out of the store, and it's still new and fresh and she wants to rest her head against Joan's, but she thinks that would make conversation a little bit difficult.
He's sulking. She recognizes the set of his shoulders from her brothers. "The last time two girls talked about keeping me I ended up being the roommate who has to wash dishes," he complains. "And my roommates cook a lot."
"We don't need a roommate," Joan says, firmly.
"I think doing the dishes is relaxing," Stephanie says, and ignores the looks she gets from both of them.
Mollified, George says he'll walk them home, which means passing by his building first. When they get there Stephanie wants to see his window, which they have to walk into the parking lot to get a good look at. George is calling Deja and Tina to get them to wave when Stephanie notices from the corner of her eye that Joan has wandered off to stand near a familiar-looking motorcycle. She smirks and doesn't say a thing, letting Joan look in private.
Two faces pop up in the window and wave at them, they both wave back and the curtains swish shut again.
"They're going to come down and look at your paint colors," George says, glancing over his shoulder. The double-take he does makes Stephanie turn, too, and she sighs while George tilts his head at her. "So would she actually kick me in the head if she got mad at me?"
Stephanie thinks about it for a moment. "Yes."
George's green eyes go wide and a bit panic-stricken.
"Only if she thought you really deserved it!" she adds hastily.
George hesitates, then wets his lips and squares his shoulders. Since he's tall but rail-thin, Stephanie doesn't think he looks that intimidating, at least not to Joan's eye, but when he also puts on an ear-to-ear smile before walking over to Joan, she guesses that intimidating wasn't what he was going for.
A few parking spaces away, Joan has her back to them. She's got her arms crossed over her chest, and she's bending over George's dark red motorcycle, peering at the dashboard. She jumps at least six inches in the air when George claps her on the shoulder.
"You can get on if you want," he says, ducking when she shoves at him. The smile doesn't slip off his face. "You don't have to just stare at it."
"I don't want to get on your bike," Joan mutters. "I'm just trying to figure out how you afforded all the customizations."
George tilts his chin up. "I do them myself."
Joan snorts.
"Hey, engineering student here!"
"Environmental engineering!"
Stephanie edges around them to latch onto the hand that Joan isn't gesticulating with. Joan links her fingers though Stephanie's and keeps arguing with George, not missing a beat. Stephanie watches them both for a few minutes, not understanding most of the talk when they actually remember that it's a motorcycle they're arguing about, and thinks that the way Joan rolls her eyes at George is very affectionate, really.
Maybe she'll even tell him that sometime.
The sound of Deja's heels clicking across the parking lot comes before the sight of her, and Stephanie grins when a long arm is thrown around her shoulders. "Oh my God," Deja says, rolling her eyes. "Do we have another bike person?"
Tina strolls by, hands stuck in her pockets, and sticks her tongue out at Deja. "We are not a separate species," she says. "Hey, Joan. Do you have a motorcycle license?"
"Nah," Joan says, rubbing at the back of her neck. "My mom said if I wanted one, I had to buy my own bike, since she'd gotten me a dingy little car, and by the time I had that much money I didn't want to let go of it."
They rattle on, and before Stephanie can feel her eyes start to glaze over she draws the paint samples out of her purse to show to Deja. Their apartment only has four rooms, including the bathroom, but Stephanie as at least five different strips of color for each, and with four hands available she can show Deja which samples are going to be pinned up on which walls.
"I like this," Deja says, tapping a square that's the same purple as her fingernail. Stephanie giggles and Deja grins. "What? It's my favorite color."
"I was thinking maybe this," Stephanie says, pointing to a lighter purple square. "As accents for the yellow. Except I'm not sure if I want the yellow in the kitchen or the living room."
Deja holds the two strips up to the light and squints at them. "The thing is they'll all look a little different when they're on the wall," she says.
"I remember," Stephanie murmurs. She painted her room every couple of years, and the last time she'd wanted a change, Joan had been away. It hadn't been as bad as she'd been expecting. "My sisters helped me paint my room a few years ago."
"What color did you pick for that?"
"Blue," Stephanie says. "Blue is good for bedrooms."
Deja purses her lips together mischievously. "You should go with a nice blue-violet."
Stephanie laughs. "I'm surprised your whole apartment isn't purple," she teases.
"Don't think she hasn't tried!" George calls.
"Why do you think we haven't moved out yet?" Tina smiles.
Deja glares.
"I love you!" Tina apologizes.
Deja rolls her eyes. "I love you too, baby," she says, making Tina laugh. Deja hands the paint samples back to Stephanie and sighs. "I've got to go work on my paper some more," she laments. "I'm only on page twenty-five."
"Only?" Stephanie asks, her eyes wide.
"I need fifteen more."
"That's more than a little horrifying," Joan nods. "I wish you luck, my friend."
Deja salutes before she goes back inside, and Tina is rocking back and forth on her heels, biting her lip. George crosses his arms across his chest and tilts his chin up. "No."
"Please?" Tina whines. "Please, please?"
"You don't want to give her a ride?" Joan drawls.
George snorts. "Tina doesn't want a ride, she--"
"Some of us had to sell their bikes to pay back loans. Some of us would totally let others of us borrow their bikes to go to the store if they had them," Tina says. She wraps her arms around George's shoulders and puts her head on his shoulder. "Please? I'll bring you food. Indian food!"
Groaning, George draws his keys out of his pocket. "You better count yourself lucky that Markus stopped cooking for me for the rest of the week," he mutters.
Tina grabs the keys and smirks. "Thanks."
"Have fun," Joan says, sighing.
"You know my offer still stands--" George starts.
Joan snorts and Stephanie raises her eyebrow. "We should get back to the hotel."
---
The apartment is still nice when they go back the next day. Joan is a little relieved, she'd had a couple of dreams to the contrary, and she thinks the way Stephanie can't stop grinning at the stove is probably a good sign.
"We should just check out of the hotel tomorrow and move in here," Stephanie says, leaning her head out the window. They don't have a balcony, but there is a fire escape that doesn't look like it would be impossible to get to.
"We don't have any furniture," Joan says. "We have to at least get a bed before we move in."
"We could get one today!" Stephanie says. "I think we don't have to dig into the savings too much to furnish this place, really. Not if we make things do double-duty. You know, the dining table is also the desk, stuff like that."
"My mom says she put out an ad for my car today," Joan says, sighing.
The money will help, she knows that, and she likes Stephanie's car better anyway even if Mr. Colbert was the one who bought it - it's a Stang (and the payments are finished, too, which she guesses matters now) - but she thinks about her little Oldsmobile sitting in the driveway all alone, and wonders who her mom is going to sell it to. She'd spent a lot of time on her back underneath that car, and she hadn't even said goodbye to it. And maybe it knew she was looking whenever a motorcycle stopped next to them at a light.
She shakes herself when she catches Stephanie staring at her, and wanders over to hang the mirror up. Stephanie wants it next to the door, where she plans to put a little table to put their keys on top of and their shoes underneath. She'd had to leave behind a few of her favorite books to get it to fit, but she'd brought her tool kit with her. There's a nail just the right size for the mirror, and it only takes a couple of minutes to get it straight.
"I'm excited," Stephanie says, appearing in the mirror over Joan's shoulder. She smiles shyly and sticks her hands in her dress pockets, and Joan turns around with the hammer still in her hand. "I've kind of been picking paint colors out for our first place since sixth grade."
Joan nearly drops the hammer on her foot. "We weren't together till eighth-"
"You were very cute in your soccer uniform," Stephanie says, trailing a finger down Joan's shirt.
Add another thing to the list of 'stuff Joan wishes she'd brought with her.'
"Maybe I can get my mom to mail it up," Joan whispers, laying her hand across Stephanie's stomach to steer her to the wall.
Stephanie's back scrapes against the bricks, and she bangs her head hard no less than three times. But Joan's hands are steady and she whispers softly to Stephanie about how she is very beautiful, makes her forget the dark blotch on her eye, and Stephanie buries her face into Joan's neck and holds on tight.
"I'm going be a mess for the wedding," Stephanie laments when they've peeled themselves apart, prodding the new bruises Joan sucked onto her neck. Twisting around, she scowls at the red marks crisscrossing her back.
Joan shrugs. "They'll have faded by then."
Scowling, Stephanie shrugs her dress back on. "In the meantime, you need to stop manhandling me so much. I want to look nice."
"You always look nice," Joan murmurs, a vacant, blissful smile on her face.
In spite of herself, the corners of Stephanie's mouth quirk up, and she scoots over to sit behind Joan, wraps her arms around Joan's neck.
"Wanna go pick out a mattress?" she grins.
---
The elevator is working the next day, and Joan leans against the kitchen counter with Stephanie, who sits on top of it since they hadn't found any chairs in their thrift-store run the day before. Joan's hands twitch every time she sees one of the deliverymen bring in a new piece of furniture - new to them, anyway - but Stephanie keeps pinching her whenever she moves away from the counter.
"You can stretch out your arms when we paint," Stephanie says, raising an eyebrow at her. "There's not much more to bring in, anyway."
"I can deal with not having a dresser for a while," Joan says, fidgeting. She wonders how many of her perfumes Stephanie has brought. They'd all been in rows on top of her dresser, though Joan still doesn't know what the order was. She'd always looked at them whenever Stephanie was off changing out of her uniform or taking a shower or talking to her parents. "But we seriously have to get a couch today."
Stephanie kicks her legs up and lets them fall back to the cabinet doors. "I thought you said we could move in once we had a bed."
"We can," Joan says. She'd already told her mom that this was going to be their last night in the hotel, and her mom keeps sending texts reminding Joan to take pictures of the apartment. "But think how much better it'll be if we wake up and have a couch delivered after breakfast tomorrow."
Stephanie looks down at her and smiles.
When they're alone again, lying on the mattress they just bought themselves, Joan lets her eyes fall shut. Stephanie is lying with her head on Joan's stomach, and Joan has her hand tangled in Stephanie's hair, and she's pretty sure she could go on like this forever. Even if they don't get a couch.
"You're happy, aren't you?" she asks, mostly because she does need to know, but also because she thinks if they're quiet much longer she's going to fall asleep.
Stephanie takes a breath. "Yeah," she whispers. "I love you."
"I love you too," Joan says. She brushes Stephanie's hair back from her face. She has to take a breath, because her throat is dry, and it doesn't really help, but the words come out even if they are creaky. "I'm sorry if I was a jerk the other day."
"You weren't," Stephanie murmurs. She hesitates. "Well, you were, but I forgive you."
Joan is quiet.
Crying over a sink, even if she'd splashed enough water in her face to make it hard to tell, had hurt. It still hurt. She kept trying not to think about it, but it was hard when Stephanie kept looking at her whenever she spent too long staring into space.
"I'm sorry I brought up your dad," Stephanie whispers. She takes off her glasses and stretches her arm out to hook them on the headboard. She looks smaller, younger without them. "That was uncalled for."
Joan nods and hopes she can feel it, because there's a hard knot in her throat that she doesn't want to try talking around just then. She squeezes her eyes shut when Stephanie slides up the bed, and doesn't move while Stephanie wraps both her arms around her, tucking Joan's face into the crook of her neck. It makes her feel small and tiny and powerless and loved.
At least she knows Stephanie brought her peach perfume with her, now.
For a while it's enough, Stephanie and peaches, and the sunlight beating down on them because one thing they did not find in the thrift stores yesterday was a decent set of curtains. Stephanie needs something decorative, Joan wants an effect like a solar eclipse, it's going to take a while to satisfy both of them.
"Stephi," Joan says, swallowing. She hopes her voice, speaking against Stephanie's skin, isn't all that muffled. She starts, "I don't think that. I don't."
Stephanie kisses the top of her head. "Shh."
Joan wets her lips, and the knots in her throat are tighter and harder than they've been since the fight, but she can hear Stephanie's heart here and it's hardly sped up at all, and she doesn't know if she'll get this chance again. Not the chance and the nerve.
"I don't think your parents are coming to the wedding," she says.
The apartment is as quiet as it was when they first walked in.
She thinks about Stephanie showing up at her doorstep that night, in her favorite shirt and jeans and heels. Crying. Nails broken and her eye swelling and her hair just barely brushed. She thinks about Stephanie sitting on her bathroom sink and cleaning off her face, and Joan sinking to her knee in the water Stephanie had splashed to the floor.
Joan thinks about kissing Stephanie's finger where it joined her hand, because she didn't have a ring.
"I want them to," Stephanie says, softly.
Joan kisses her collarbone.
"If we could have anything, I would want to get married outside," Stephanie says. She starts to card her fingers through Joan's hair, and Joan doesn't even fidget. "In the country, with flowers on the trees. And in my hair. Slipcovers and cushions on all the seats, so people are comfortable and don't complain when I make them sit through my big sister singing my three favorite hymns."
Smiling, Joan wriggles an arm under Stephanie to tug her closer.
"You wandering around fixing my brothers' bow ties before it all starts, because they never listen when mom tells them how to tie them. Me grabbing you to talk about stuff, and you laughing because I'm wrapped up in some tablecloth, trying to keep you from seeing my dress. And my dad walking me down the aisle. And crying."
She sniffs, and Joan holds her tight enough that she thinks she hears both their ribs protesting.
"My dad never cries," Stephanie says. Her voice is damp. "Not at any of my sisters' weddings. But he'd cry at mine. I'm his baby girl."
She buries her face in Joan's hair and takes deep breaths. Joan waits for a minute, then wriggles out of her grip to make up the height difference. Her socked feet rub against Stephanie's shins, and she brings Stephanie's head against her shoulder even though she can already hear her apologizing for getting Joan's shirt wet.
"My mom will cry," Joan promises. She rubs her hand up and down Stephanie's back. It still hurts to talk, the knots in her throat gathering at the back of her tongue, but Stephanie needs her voice now. "And I'll have to tie my brother's tie. And if you want I bet he'll walk you down the aisle."
"He's not my brother."
Joan doesn't know what to say to that.
Stephanie leans back just far enough so she can see Joan's face. There are dark smudges around both her eyes now, but they're definitely just makeup, and Stephi seems to know they're there from the way she smears her tears away.
She grabs the front of Joan's shirt, twisting it up in her fingers. "I want you to promise you'll cry at our daughter's wedding."
"Promise," Joan whispers.
"Even if she makes you promise not to."
"Double promise."
Sniffing, Stephanie sits up. "I look awful," she says, wiping at her face with her palms. "We can't go shopping today. Everyone will just stare at me."
Joan lies across her lap and gazes up at her face. "Stephi, you look fine. You look beautiful."
"I look awful," she repeats, pressing her hands over her face.
"Stephi?"
"The bruise still hasn't healed," she whispers, fingers curling into fists. "It's all anyone looks at."
Joan opens her mouth and reaches up to wrap her hands around Stephanie's wrists. "I can't see it," she says, tugging Stephanie's hands down. "Stephi."
"People must think I'm some kind of wreck."
"No."
"But-"
"No. Stephanie, listen to me." Joan manages to sit up without actually letting go of her hands, although twisting so she's facing Stephanie is a little harder. "Sometimes ... sometimes you only see the ... what you think are the worst parts of yourself. But I wouldn't lie to you, would I?"
Stephanie frowns. "...No."
Joan touches their foreheads together. "You're beautiful, Stephi. And I love you. And we're going to get married."
Just the corner of Stephanie's mouth twitches up, and she lets out a breath over Joan's lips. "Yeah," she says. Her lips twitch again, and it's nearly a real smile. "Mrs. and Mrs. Stewart."
Joan is going to regret this later, but... "George would probably walk you down the aisle. If you asked."
Stephanie laughs, and clamps her hand over her mouth.
Part Three