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June 6, 2015
Don’t let him in again.
There’s a hurt sixteen-year-old in her heart, repeating it over and over again, a cautionary tale. Self-preservation. The same hurt sixteen-year-old girl who pushed everyone away when they got too close ever since that night in the gazebo.
Don’t let him in, she tries to remind herself, but then he’s calling her again and she’s hanging up on Rhaena and answering him without hesitation.
Don’t let him in, and he’s meeting her at the Airbnb she’d booked for her trip into the city, her favorite soda in a CVS bag hanging from his free hand. She hadn’t asked him to buy it. He hadn’t even texted to see if she wanted one.
Don’t let him in, and then she does.
. . .
“It’s getting late. I should get home before Dad starts worrying.”
She should let him go. She really should. But his cheeks are flushed from laughing and his smile is sweet and he looks just like every dream she’s ever had of him, and so instead of letting him go she opens her traitorous mouth and asks him to stay. To text Harwin. To tell his dad who he was with, to type her name on his phone B-a-e-l-a and not leave her as some dirty little secret he’d run into after all these years.
“You’re not a dirty little secret.”
But I was, the hurt sixteen-year-old in her heart whispers.
“Prove it,” She says, pushing back against him, against the memory, going on defense.
Baela’s in town, the text reads when he shows her, already sent, staying with her.
Don’t let him in, and then she’s tossing the phone back onto the table with a victorious feeling, standing in front of him.
Don’t let him in and there’s the taste of his mouth, the feel of it against hers, the heat of his hands over the waistband of her shorts.
Don’t let him in, and then she’s on his lap, leaving marks down his neck that he’ll blush about tomorrow.
. . .
June 7, 2015
Don’t let him in again.
They’re sitting in a McDonalds, it’s raining, and if she closes her eyes it almost feels like home, even if Jace’s Valyrian leaves something to be desired. Even living away from home, she’d still had Rhaena, but Jace only had phone calls and summers at the ranch. An outsider would think him fluent, would hear the way it falls off his tongue and fall in love with him just by the sound of it, but she knows better. He wears their language like a nametag for work, tucked away in the glove compartment of a car until you go in for your shift.
She’s out of view of the FaceTime call, smiling into her coffee as Aegon chatters on over the line in rapid fire Valyrian, her father’s voice faintly in the background, soothing Vis. You’ll have your turn soon, she hears him say, and it makes her smile.
Her phone buzzes with a text, sharp against the tacky plastic table, shining with the picture of Rhaena and her at the beach as her wallpaper.
Rhaena: good night? 😉
Baela smirks.
Baela: could have been better
A pause, she glances up at Jace, still listening to Egg’s rambling. His eyes slip over to her, a smile pulling at his lips, and when she goes back to her phone it’s with heat creeping up the back of her neck. Luke would surely find out and bully him if she only said that.
Baela: didn’t have protection, store wasn’t open, still had fun though 👀
Rhaena: there’s always pulling out?
Baela: you scare me. Pls tell me that’s not what you and Luke do
Baela: actually don’t tell me anything. I’m having a good day rn.
The typing bubble appears and disappears. She can’t help but send another.
Baela: also you think Jace would ever in a million years consider the pull out method to be safe enough for him?
Baela could confirm, with absolute certainty, that it was not. She’d been hot and bothered enough to bring it up as an option, even promised to buy a plan b the next morning, to no avail.
Well, some avail. She may have missed out on that but she sure hadn’t been neglected. Far from neglected. She felt the need to write his ex a thank you card for all the education she'd given him, though she felt under the circumstances of the breakup it might not be appreciated.
Rhaena: probably not
Baela: ill call you later tonight
Rhaena: hmmmmmm im sure you will
Baela fights back a grin, closing her messages as she stretches out a foot to brush it against his leg. His knee bounces so high it hits the bottom of the table and he sends her a glare that nearly sends her into a fit of laughter. She keeps her foot against his ankle, not even moving it, but simply enjoying watching the blush slowly climb his neck.
She lets herself look at him, taking him in, soaking in the blush and the color of his lips and the curls drying against his forehead. At the tap of his fingertips on the side of his fountain drink, at the twitch of his mouth at something Egg said on the call.
Her father’s prying their half-brother away from the phone then, passing it over to Rhaenyra for final goodbyes before finally, the call ends and he can give her his full attention once again.
“Your Valyrian needs work.” She isn’t about to start sugar-coating things now, “Your trills are atrocious.”
He shrugs, rolling his eyes even as he smiles, “Luke was always better at those.”
“Yeah, because he’s been a chatterbox since he left the womb. You’ve always been the pouting, silent type. But even pouty, silent boys need to practice their Valyrian so their trills don’t sound like garbage.”
Another eye roll, but when he speaks again it’s in their mother tongue, “How fortunate that I have another fluent speaker with me.”
“Yes,” She grins, “Very, very fortunate. Sadly not for long though, I’m headed back to High Tide in an hour or two.”
Her foot shifts against him and he catches it between his calves, “Or you could stay another night. At mine.”
She blinks, stunned. He wants her to stay?
“At your dad’s?”
He follows her slip back into English, “He knows I’m with you. He’s working this weekend and its a big enough place that we probably won’t even see Larys and Alys.”
Baela reaches over the middle of the table, stealing a piece off of his hash brown while she turned that over in her mind.
Don’t let him in.
But she wants to. She really, really wants to.
“Not planning on sneaking me in through the window?” She tries to make the smile on her face seem playful. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t.
He laughs a little, smiling.
“Only if you’re into that kind of thing.”
. . .
Don’t let him in.
They stop by the drugstore on the way.
She texts her grandmother in the checkout line that she’s staying with a friend for another night, that she’ll be a day late returning to High Tide.
He walks her in through the front door of the sprawling house, up the stairs, down the hallway. He kisses her against his bedroom door, on the hall side and the bedroom side of it-
“Should I be worried about you accidentally saying her name or-“
“Nope, I’ll be saying yours.”
How’s she supposed to come up with a good comeback to that? She can feel him noticing her shock, swallowing up the hitch in her breath before he pulls away to smile against the skin of her neck.
“That was smooth,” She tries to say with a steady voice, but fails, “did you practice it in the mirror? Call someone up to coach you through it a couple times?”
“Rude,” He huffs, but he’s smiling and warm and gentle and his mouth is sucking a mark into her neck, so she figures she’ll let him win this one. For now.
. . .
After, she fishes her pajama shorts out of her suitcase, pulls them on underneath his shirt and climbs back into bed to lay on him. To commit the feel of being held by him to memory, an arm around her shoulders as the other scrolls for the number of his favorite Chinese restaurant.
She texts Rhaena while he calls and orders for them, smirking into his skin after she hits send.
Baela: good night, even better day 😉
. . .
June 8, 2015
Leaving hurts more than she'd expected it to.
He insists on riding with her in her car to the gas station, pays for the fill up despite the fact that she’s pretty sure their money comes out of the same exact account, and when he holds her face between his hands she almost caves. Almost stays.
He kisses her against the car door till someone whistles and he pulls away blushing, kissing her foreahead and the top of her head before he hugs her. It’s terrifying how she doesn't want to go, how she’d be happy to stay. A few days ago, she would have slapped him for touching her, now she’s been in his bed and his arms and it's everything she ever wanted but couldn’t have.
“I love you,” Jace says against her mouth, bent into her car window, one last kiss before she drives away-
He sees her panic, her fear, her disbelief, “You don’t have to say anything, you just need to know it, okay?”
Baela nods.
He kisses her again.
He watches her leave.
In the rearview, she watches him.
Don’t let him in again, her heart begs, but it’s too late now, isn’t it?
He’s in, it’s just a question of when he’ll be walking out.
. . .
June 9, 2015
She doesn’t answer his texts, mutes his notifications, stares out the window of her bedroom and tries to pretend for a moment that she never saw him again.
High Tide threatens to drown her in memory. She sits on the porch and thinks about the gazebo, thinks about how his words stung her, how the wound bled and swelled up and was impossible to ignore. Thinks about taunting and scratching at that wound in bed with him, lying next to him underneath clean sheets and poking. Pressing his buttons to try and make him leave her on her own terms.
She didn’t want to be surprised, it’d hurt worse that way.
Was she your first? She’d asked him, thinking about the other girl who had laid in that bed and had her heart broken by the boy in it.
He’d nodded.
Don’t you want to know mine? Don’t you want a list? She’d prodded, scratched the scab between them, but he’d given her one of those looks. The one that looked like Rhaenyra’s face when Aegon was overtired and throwing a fit because of it. The one she made when Vis cried because another baby was crying, wanting all the focus to be on him.
As long as you chose them and they listened to you, then no, and he’d given her that look again and it had been infuriating, I don’t need a list, sweetheart.
She’d tried to say something after that, but he dedicated himself to his new task and she found herself distracted by that.
. . .
June 10, 2015
Rhaena calls her a coward.
She unmutes his notifications, lies in her bathtub with suds up to her chin, scrolls through a dozen texts until one stands out, until it burns itself into her eyes so that when she closes them she still sees it.
Jace: I’m not going anywhere, not unless you really want me to go
Jace: I talked to Rhaena, she said you’re not answering her either
Jace: Is there anything I can do to help?
She thinks about throwing her phone across the bathroom and letting it crack against the wall. Let the screen crack into spiderwebs, let the glass crunch on the floor beneath the soles of her tennis shoes, leaving his words unreadable.
She won’t be able to forget them, though. They’re burned in, they’re not going anywhere.
That’s the difference, isn’t it? Between words and people? Words don’t change, they mostly don’t disappoint you later on, and if they do it’s likely someone elses fault. People, though? They do. They always do.
When she was fifteen she found out that her grandfather had two children with another woman, children her and Rhaena’s age, children he pretended didn’t exist, that her grandmother kept a stiff upper lip about. She didn’t know how to separate that betrayal from the man who carried her on her shoulders at the fair as a little girl.
The man who had held her hand at her mama’s funeral. Who had checked on her and Rhaena when their father remarried so soon after her death. Who had a little marble memorial in the backyard for their dead baby brother, fresh flowers on it weekly.
She’d been friends with Alyn, meeting him through a friend of a friend, before she’d known. After, she could only see the lines of her grandfather’s face in his own, and then he’d disappointed her too when he found out she knew. Her pain was minimized, pushed away, quieted, because he’d always remind her that, no matter what, at least her father never pretended that she didn’t exist.
She wants her mother. She wants her hands in her hair, gently combing out the tangles. She wants her to lay in the bed next to her until she finally falls asleep, running over the spot between her eyebrows with a gentle thumb until it soothes her into a dream.
She wants her mother, she can’t have her mother. She can’t have her father, he’s too close to Rhaenyra. She can’t have Rhaena, not really, she’s too close to Luke. She can’t have her grandfather, he’s a traitor. She can’t have her grandmother, she’ll just remind Baela that I told you, that boy’s just like his mama.
She wants Jace. She wants the comfort and distraction of laying next to him in a bed, sitting next to him in a car, in a booth at a restuarant. Walking hand in hand down a sidewalk or up a flight of stairs.
Please don’t let him in again, again, pleading, begging, but it doesn’t stop her from typing a reply to his text.
Baela: can I see you?
He’s four hours away, she knows he’ll say no. People disappoint, it’s inevitable.
She tosses the phone aside, sinking underneath the water and cursing herself for the suds getting into her curls. It’s hot against her closed eyes, the seal of her lips, prickling heat at her hairline, and when she rises above it again it makes the bathroom feel chilled. Her phone buzzes once, twice, and she can’t stop herself from looking.
Jace: I’m at the Mcdonalds on 8th
Jace: Do you want me to order you anything?
She bursts into tears, ugly tears, with snot running and hiccups in her chest, and starts rinsing the suds from her hair as fast as she can.
. . .
His arms open the second he sees her and she can’t stop herself from going into them.
He’s warm. He’s ordered her food, filled her drink with just the right amount of ice, the amount she likes. He’s gotten her three ketchup packets, that’s all she ever needs.
She cries in his arms. It’s the closest she can get to her mother’s. She's never felt more known.
. . .
Could she bear it if he left again?
Could she bear it after knowing his mouth and his hands and the freckles on his hip?
Could she bear it after knowing the way he breathed when he slept, the way his lips pouted, the messy curls of his bedhead?
Leave him behind or risk being left behind? Rolls the dice, play the odds, give in to the awful, wretched hope of loving him?
Don’t let him in, the brokenhearted girl in her heart begs, not again. He’ll just leave. Everyone leaves.
. . .
June 11, 2015
Baela wakes up first.
They’re in the guest apartment above the poolhouse at High Tide, just separate enough from the main house that she doesn't have to worry about her grandmother realizing Jace is there. He’s still asleep next to her, all rumpled sheets and the grey band of his boxers cutting a pretty line across his hips
What can I do? He’d asked again the night before.
I don’t know, she’d said.
He’d pressed kisses to her ribs, to her kneecaps, to the flutter of her pulse in her wrists, as if loving her from head to toe meant he’d stay forever. I love you, he’d said, again, and again he’d said that she didn’t need to say it back. I love you, again, I love you, again-
He pulls her closer now, close enough that his heartbeat feels like it could be her own. His hand splays wide across her belly, heavy and warm, pulling her back against his chest. I love you, he whispers, and she leans back into his lips, letting them press against her shoulder with the sharp edge of his nose.
“Come home with me.”
She thinks he must still be half asleep, turning her head to look over her shoulder and find his dark eyes waiting for her there, “What?”
“Come home with me,” He says again, “I’m supposed to visit the ranch tomorrow, we can drive back down to my dad’s today and then to Dragonstone later tomorrow.”
“Will they know?”
His arm squeezes her, her stomach flips at the feeling.
“If you want them too, yeah.”
She bristles, throws her shields up, tries to cover up the vunerable underbelly of her heart and soul even as his fingers spread wide over it, “I do. I want that.”
There’s a smile in his voice, “So you’ll go?”
Go back to the place where she can’t help but think he’ll betray her again?
She must. This has to end before it destroys her.
“When do you want to leave?” She asks, in lieu of a proper answer, and wants to scream.
. . .
June 12, 2015
There’s something about the drive that’s healing. She can’t hide from him, not really, when he’s holding her hand on the center console and singing to her. The affection she feels for him is terrifying. She can’t stop it.
The closer they get, the more she understands what has to be done. The thing that terrifies Jace is being known, being percived. Facing the terror of exisiting in the judgemental eyes of Dragonstone will crack the facade, will show his true self. It did last time, didn’t it?
She pulls into the driveway, takes his hand, squeezes it, and when they walk in the front door she watches his mother’s eyes go wide with surprise as he makes her laugh with a joke.
. . .
She’s possessive of her car, it was her mom's.
When she hands him the keys to drive them over to the ranch, he looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time. She waits for him to mess up, to not treat the car with reverence, but he doesn’t. They pull into the gravel lot, he holds her hand on the middle console in front of their siblings, and when she gets out on the passenger side she sees her father and Rhaenyra watching with faces that bear something akin to awe.
. . .
Push me away, she wants to dare him, wants to whisper into his ear, wants to taunt as she wraps her arms around his waist from behind, resting her chin on his shoulder.
He’s tense, so tense, and she gets the sinking feeling that she might have finally, horribly, succeeded, but then his shoulders loosen a bit. Her chin sinks in even more.
“Comfy back there?” He asks, a smile in his voice.
She laughs and tucks her face into his neck. He smells like his cologne, its becoming terrifyingly addictive. She’s half tempted to buy a bottle just for smelling when he’s gone.
She’s not prepared for the surprise of his hands hooking under her thighs, hoisting her up as if she weighs nothing. It makes her blush, heat racing all over, and if they weren’t quite literally surrounded by their family right then she’d be doing some terrible, terrible things to him. Mainly involving getting him up against a wall and having him lift her that effortlessly again-
“Keep those hands in respectable places, Jace!” She rolls her eyes at her dad’s call from Caraxes’ stall.
Baela huffs, crossing her ankles in front of Jace, “He can put those hands wherever he wants. I sure wouldn’t mind.”
The sides of Jace’s neck somehow blush even redder than they already were.
“Baela!” Rhaena covers Vis’ ears with her hands.
Next to her, Luke laughs, the volume of it causing Joff to glance up from petting one of the foals and ask what was going on.
“See? They’ve lived long enough with Dad that they’re deaf to it. They’re fine.”
Baela squeezes her thighs around Jace’s ribs, finding herself desperately wishing they were alone in the barn, “Now, onward, I want to find Vhagar.”
. . .
They go for a walk after dinner, slow and leisurely and with more than enough time to kiss in the dark corners of the barn and the pool house and that one particularly large tree trunk-
She’s not expecting the gazebo. She tries not to let it show, though, climbing the stairs up into the glow of the string lights and looking out over the dark lawn.
“Well, I sure hope you aren’t planning on making any more lasting memories here-“
And then Baela turns and sees him.
He’s kneeling, looking more nervous than she’s ever seen him, and suddenly she can’t breathe all that well. Can you breathe in a dream? In a nightmare? She isn’t sure which of the two this could be, whether it was true and lovely or the teasing horror of dangling everything she could have had right in front of her before ripping it away-
“Jace?” She hates how her voice trembles.
“Marry me.” It doesn't even come out as a question. More of a plea, more of a prayer.
Any words she could be saying are stuck in her throat, choking her. He stumbles over his words but keeps going, unable to stop.
“I thought I could be happy without you but I don’t think I can. It’s not possible when all I can do when were apart is think about being with you. Talking to you, kissing you, sleeping next to you every night and waking up to you every morning. I’m done running. I can’t stay here, but I never meant to run from you, and I don’t intend to make that kind of mistake again.”
He’s digging in his jeans pocket, the one that Syrax was so obsessed with, something glittering and golden caught between his fingers.
“I’ll leave if you ask me to, but if I go anywhere I want you there with me. Let me scream to this awful town that you’re the one I love and that I want you to be my wife and then run away with me to a life they can’t touch. To a life where we can start over as just us, as Baela and Jace. Just us. That’s all I want, is you, is us.”
He wants to run. He wants to take her with him.
Can she bear it? Can she bear going out into the world with him to watch her back and knowing that she’ll have to trust him to do so?
“And if I ask you to stay here?”
If I ask you to remain miserable, would you stay? If I drag you down with me, will you grow bitter?
Does she even want to stay? No, no she doesn’t. But she has to know. She needs to know.
He shakes his head and her breath leaves her in a horrible sinking rush before he speaks again.
“I don’t want my children, our children, to grow up like I did. To hear the things I heard when I was too young to understand them. I can’t do that to them, it would kill me just like not having you in my life would. You’re it for me, but I can’t put them through living in this place.”
There’s something about it that curls up warm in her belly. Him, protecting the children that aren’t even a thought yet, saving them from the fate he could never truly escape. Part of him will never leave this town, no matter how far he goes, he’ll always be here. The piece of him here will be angry, torn down, biting at the hand that reaches towards him, unable to be saved because it was hurt too much when it was young.
But he’ll never let her babies feel that way. He’ll put himself between them and harm as a shield of flesh and bone and blood and heart.
He’ll do it without hesitation, because that’s just who he is.
Her eyes fill with tears, hands trembling at her sides, and she doesn't know how to believe but she does know that she wants to.
“Ask me again.”
“What?”
He sounds as disbelieving as she feels. It fills her chest up with warmth, golden and sweet and growing.
“Ask me. Again.”
He holds out the ring and through her tears she can see the gleam of gold and sparkle of stone. She couldn’t care less about the band and gem, she just wants him. Wants him to stay, to hold her close, to never walk away from her. To choose her first, before anyone else. Just for a moment, that would be enough, it would be more than enough.
“Will you marry me?”
Please don’t let him in.
When she was sixteen, she thought she’d never be able to trust anyone again. She thought that it was safer to be alone, to push people away when they got too close to her heart.
She’s terrified.
She lets him in anyways.