Song Short: Peace

this new series, Song Short, will be updated on the third Friday of each month! each short (~1.5-2k) is a queer snippet based around some of my favorite songs. these are written in a one hour sprint and never really edited, so please consider forgiving typos. join my patreon to suggest songs and let me know what you think of these shorts!

today’s short is based on Taylor Swift’s “Peace” from her album Folklore. Listen here: YouTube Link and read below. cw for: general angst, mentions of homophobia, wlw couple not out so like that whole thing, mentions of religion

Kaia watched the rain trickle down the windowsill and plop onto the wet, browning carpet.

It had been falling for an hour now. She noticed, faintly, when it first started. She noticed, faintly, when she started to shiver. And she noticed, faintly, when she didn’t care at all about any of it.

The rain was going to seep into her carpet, ruin the floor beneath, before bleeding into the ceiling above her living room. The water damage would brown the ceiling, maybe even break it. She should close the window.

Kaia didn’t move. She didn’t look away. If she looked away, even for a moment, she wouldn’t be able to stop herself from looking over at Chloe’s body, warm and sprawled across their small, unkempt bed. The blankets would probably be pooled around her waist, or halfway off the bed already. She’d been asleep since their fight ended, hours ago, and Kaia had been in this chair, watching it rain ever since.

She didn’t even remember what the fight was about. She had no goddamn idea what they could possibly have been arguing about this time — the bills were a common enough grievance if for no other reason than it was easy. Maybe they were arguing about the car that broke last week, the one that Chloe wanted to fix and Kaia wanted to scrap for parts. Maybe they were arguing about the undone dishes or the unvacuumed floor.

It didn’t matter what words they had been saying. She and Chloe both knew what they had been arguing about, really.

Really, the fight was about the same thing it always was about. This time, it was about the grocery store earlier that day, and the wide, gulfing space that Chloe had put between them, and the way she introduced Kaia as her roommate.

As always, the fight went along the same structured narrative, and neither of them had any room to budge. Because the fight was so common, Chloe had barely even understood why Kaia was upset. It’s none of their fucking business, Kai. 

Jesus.

It was the same excuse that Chloe had been doling out since they turned sixteen and too many wine coolers had them feeling each other up behind the school gymnasium. It was the same excuse that Chloe had been scoffing since she’d broke up with her college girlfriend and moved halfway across the country when Kaia got into grad school. It was the same goddamn excuse that Chloe had been using since Kaia asked her to marry her, and Chloe hadn’t said yes any more than she hadn’t said no.

Kaia buried her face in her hands.

Her skin smelled like Chloe’s hand lotion. Sandalwood and sage. It was a husky, deep scent, one that usually had all the tight knots in Kaia’s muscles unwinding just from a single sniff.

Now, though, it just made the tears prick hotter against her squeezed shut eyelids.

She pulled back abruptly, blinking rapidly, and pushed the heels of her hands hard against her eyes. Her vision spotted black and white and she forced herself to take deep, calming breaths that didn’t really do much of anything, but she had been told nevertheless were important.

Kaia looked back out the window. There was a bolt of lightning, sharp blue against the black skyline. No thunder followed. Kaia kept waiting for it to hit, for the rumbling sound to shake her, but it just… never came.

“Kai?”

Kaia stiffened. It took her a long, pulsing moment to unscrew her body and turn to face her maybe, sort-of fiancee.

Chloe was sitting halfway up, sleep-mussed and blearily blinking herself awake. She had a hand pressed to the mattress behind her body and the other was fisted in the gray sheets. Her long blonde hair was mussed, teased a few inches away from her scalp from the way she tossed and turned in the night. She still had the black smudges of her mascara underneath her eyes.

Kaia’s feet hit the floor, hands falling to her knees, and her heart twisted at the tension in the air between them. Chloe looked like she’d been crying — Kaia hadn’t even heard her.

Kaia had been in love with Chloe since they were ten years old.

Chloe always swore that she’d been in love since they were nine.

Kaia couldn’t believe something so romantic could be so utterly unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

“Go back to bed,” Kaia murmured, wincing at the way her voice sounded too rough. Despite never actually shedding a tear, her voice had that deep, gravel-dragged sound to it anyway. Chloe’s face softened immediately and she was throwing the covers off to climb out of bed, ignoring Kaia’s feeble protests.

She landed on the carpet next to Kaia, only marginally missing the wet spot Kaia had been letting grow for too long now. Looking at it now, she found she couldn’t tear her eyes away.

Was that what they were? Soft, plodding rain that fell through the cracks? Kaia and Chloe were a couple, but were they only there in the cracks of their real lives? Were they just soft, plodding rain that was growing heavier and heavier, spreading too wide, and causing damage that neither were strong enough to deal with?

Chloe was Kaia’s everything.

Kaia knew that she was Chloe’s everything, too. She didn’t doubt Chloe’s love for her — fierce, protective, consuming that it was, she’d never doubted it for a moment, even back when neither of them understood it. Chloe would stand beside her with bloodied knuckles and a bruised face before she’d let Kaia feel anything other than safe. High school had taught her that.

But Chloe was willing to stand by and let Kaia feel like this.

And, fuck, what did that mean?

It’s not about you or us, Chloe had tried to explain once, when she’d tucked the engagement ring in her underwear drawer. I’m just a private person. I don’t want strangers to know anything about me. C’mon, Kai, you know that.

And it wasn’t like no one knew. Their friends did. Kaia’s family did. But this shadowed existence felt darker and lonelier the older and the farther from the lives they’d once built side by side they got.

And, worse, Kaia knew what Chloe stood to lose if they were brazen. Her job at the seminary, her place in her grad program, her family — her niece, whose family wouldn’t recognize as a girl, who only had Chloe and, when she could be there, Kaia.

It wasn’t that Chloe was refusing to give Kaia what she wanted or needed. It was so much worse than that. And they both knew it.

“Kaia,” Chloe said, breaking her from her thoughts. She started and looked down.

Chloe, on her knees, tentatively placed her hands over Kaia’s on her knees. She tilted her head forward, chin high as she took her in. A bolt of lightning outside brightened the room, illuminating Chloe. For a brief, fleeting moment, she was lit up with the sharp white-blue of electricity, a halo around her reverent expression.

Her hazel eyes were wide and there were two spots of bright pink on her face, high along her cheekbones. Her lips were parted and she closed them again, rolling them together until the pink color faded to a white. She released them and the color bled back in. Kaia watched and felt all at once just how much she loved this woman.

She pulled one of her hands out from underneath Chloe’s and placed it on her cheek. She ran her thumb across the apple of her cheek and tried not to let out the shaking sob in her chest when Chloe leaned into it.

“I’m sorry,” Chloe said, sounding as broken as Kaia felt.

“Will this…” Kaia stopped, feeling the hard, round lump in her throat so viscerally, she couldn’t even begin to shove words out around it. “Will this ever be more?”

“Will this be enough?” Chloe retorted. “Will I?”

Kaia’s eyes screwed shut as she let out a gasping breath. It had been knocked out of her — her shoulders curled forward, her stomach sucking in, as the weight of Chloe’s words landed like a punch.

“I’m sorry,” Chloe said quickly, sitting up on her knees, and winding her arms around Kaia’s body. Kaia let herself be pulled in, placing her face in the crook of Chloe’s neck, breathing in the deep, sandalwood scent. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She said it again and again, the litany so familiar that Kaia felt like her heart was beating in rhythm. Most days, this was her nightly prayer.

“I would die for you,” Chloe whispered into Kaia’s hair.

Kaia knew — she’d tried once or twice, going up against muggers with knives, bullies in threes, and, in one pretty spectacularly dumb move, a swerving car.

But Kaia also knew the one — maybe only one — stipulant that Chloe had. 

“In secret.”

Wrapped in her arms, Kaia could feel Chloe flinch from her words. She wished — fuck, fuck, she wished — that she could bring herself to regret it.

“Devil’s in the detail,” Chloe said, and the joke fell flat in the quiet, dark room. She swallowed hard, audibly. “You’re my best friend.”

Kaia couldn’t reply. If she opened her mouth, she’d lose it.

“I love you, Kai,” Chloe said, voice breaking.

Kaia’s hands fisted in the t-shirt Chloe wore. She was halfway out of her chair now, being held up by Chloe’s strong arms. Just like she always had been.

She pulled back, just a little, to see her. Chloe looked ruined. Her face was pale and ashen, her lips trembling. Kaia couldn’t imagine that she looked any better. The tears she’d been holding back for so long were falling now, freely, and though Chloe tried to swipe them away, she was not fast enough.

Kaia grabbed her by the face, thumbs along the corners of her mouth, and she half-dragged Chloe toward her. When they kissed, it was much too hard, too fast, teeth gnashing and biting as their lips parted and they tried to get as close as they could. She was shaking so hard that she could barely keep their lips connected.

Chloe wretched away, eyes flickering across the wall beside them, unable to look at her. She slumped down on her calves. Her jaw twitched and locked, and her hands fell to her lap, fisted together.

“I’m so in love with you, Chloe,” she promised, hands rising, twitching uselessly in the space between them, before she reluctantly pulled them back. Chloe didn’t look over. Kaia’s heartbeat was too loud, and she couldn’t get a good breath in — her lungs felt too full, or maybe too small. She felt her pulse in the strangest places, like beneath her tongue and in her thighs. She felt like she’d just run a mile. She felt like her whole life was falling like the rain outside, and too much of it was slipping into the window and seeping into the carpet.

“Would it be enough?” Chloe repeated, eyes still fixated on the wall. Kaia watched her profile, the strong slope of her jaw, the small, barely perceptible bump in her nose, the three freckles just beneath her ear that Kaia had always likened to a constellation — would just this, nights during a storm together — be enough?

Kaia’s throat was too swollen to speak. She knew that Chloe understood that, understood her. She understood that her lack of answer wasn’t an answer in and of itself. Still, when Chloe finally turned to her, hair falling over her shoulder to fall in a curtain, framing her face, she had tears swimming in her eyes.

“Would it be enough if I could never give you peace?”

And Kaia hated herself a little bit more that she didn’t have an answer for that, either.